


Harry Potter and the Son of Krypton

by LORDXVNV



Category: DC Comics, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Superman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Crossover, Dumbledore is Metron which justifies the manipulation, F/M, Good Albus Dumbledore, I mean technically hogwarts covers the high school years right?, James Potter Lives, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Slytherin Harry Potter, Snape is Batman, WBWL becomes Lex Luthor, Wrong Boy-Who-Lived (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27622472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LORDXVNV/pseuds/LORDXVNV
Summary: Harry Potter and his brother Clark have always been close, and look forward to starting Hogwarts together.  But their seven years at Hogwarts won’t be anywhere as simple as James Potter hopes they’ll be. Voldemort still lurks in the shadows,  and the arrival of Kal-El of Krypton on Earth always sparks the Age of Heroes…Updates Wednesdays.
Relationships: Daphne Greengrass/Harry Potter, Diana (Wonder Woman)/Clark Kent, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Luna Lovegood/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	1. The Boys Who Lived

**Author's Note:**

> A bit about the premise: In DC's Multiverse, metafictionally, every universe starts with Superman. There is always a Superman, but depending on how and where he arrives, the rest of the universe evolves differently. There is usually a Batman, a Wonder Woman, and a Justice League, but who they actually are varies wildly from universe to universe.
> 
> Here, the Age of Heroes begins in Wizarding Britain, and it is here that heroes are born.

The Potters lived a quiet life, deep in the Black Forest of Germany. They had moved there after the tragic incident that had taken Lily Potter’s life, and there they had stayed for nearly a decade. The world thought them dead, and they had no desire to change that view.

Most of them time, it was just the three of them: James, Clark, and Harry. Sometimes, their sickly Uncle Remus would spend time with them, when James could convince him to accept ‘charity,’ though he would never do so when the night skies were filled by the full moon. Occasionally, their Uncle Sirius would visit for weeks on end, when the Auror Office wasn’t keeping him too busy. And once in a while, Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, would visit.

James had already made arrangements for Harry to go to Hogwarts as opposed to one of the other great wizarding schools, but he was unsure what to do with Clark. The circumstances of Clark’s birth left James uncertain whether he would have magic at all. On paper, he was Harry’s twin, but the truth was far stranger.

Until one day, shortly before the two boys turned eleven, when something not even James could anticipate happened.

* * *

Clark was stuck in the air slightly left of a tree, and Harry was reasonably sure it wasn’t his fault this time.

He walked into the kitchen of their tiny cottage deep within the Black Forest of Germany, and found his father surrounded by piles of books, newspapers, filings, and several whirring Dark Detecting Devices.

James peered over his glasses as he worked on a half-legal piece of paperwork for Albus Dumbledore. “Hey, kid. Come to help me with the paperwork?”

“Can you get Clark out of the air?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Clark seems stuck. In midair. And I didn’t do it.”

James sighed. He’d seen stuff like this before when he was younger, and accidental magic was no joke. Either one of the boys could’ve hurled Clark into the air, and there was no guarantee that he would be able to descend safely. Thankfully, Snivellus’s Liberacorpus was fairly universal. “I’ll take care of it.”

It didn’t work.

James frowned. “Are you sure he’s stuck there?”

“Why would he still be up there? Everything that goes up, must come down?”

“Where did you hear that?” James said. It wasn’t necessarily true. There were charms of perpetual flight, or charms of ‘throw-into-the-sun’.

“One of mum’s books. One of the muggle ones.”

“Ah.”

Even so many years after the fact, Lily’s death was still a sore point for James. He missed her dearly, and the often strange and mechanistic view she had of the universe, though it warmed his heart to see that some of her spirit lived on in their son.

The two of them headed outside, where James saw Clark hovering high in the sky, a speck haloed by the sun. For a second, his blood ran cold — Clark was hovering, free from spell or intention, much like the Dark Lord that had terrorized Britain for many years. But then he shook it off. There were no commonalities between Clark and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, no strings of fate that entwined them.

“Clark, son?” James shouted, only realizing that a Sonorous might be wise after the fact, “YOU ALRIGHT UP THERE?”

Clark clutched his ears. Then, he fell.

“Whoops,” muttered James, canceling the Amplifying Charm. “Arresto Momentum!”

Clark’s descent slowed, and it seemed almost as if he righted himself. By the time he was at ground level, he was standing upright, and he landed gracefully on his feet. James’s stomach lurched, but he forced himself to think about it logically. Whatever Clark was doing was smooth, graceful, and natural, not at all like how You-Know-Who’s flight, forceful and destructive.

“Did you have to be so loud?” Clark said.

“I’m sorry,” said James, with a smile to cover his palpitating heart. “Wasn’t sure you’d hear me up there.”

James quickly glanced over at Harry, who seemed to be fine. The Amplifying Charm was supposed to account for proximity so not to hurt the ears. This was extremely odd, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

“I was enjoying myself in the sun,” said Clark.

“What, exactly, happened?” said James. Questions were a good way to cover up for panic.

“Well, we were climbing the tree,” said Harry, always quick with explanations and excuses, “and I decided that I wanted to get a notebook to describe what the ground looked like below us. And when I came back, he was 50 feet higher and floating in midair.”

James nodded slowly. “Clark?”

Clark shrugged. “I was going to fall because I was too high, and then I didn’t.”

“Yeah, for an hour,” said Harry. “Dad, doesn’t accidental magic not last for an hour?”

“Usually, no,” said James, as he flashed a winning smile, “but then again, Potters are rarely normal! Now, why don’t you boys keep playing before dinner?”

The boys shrugged—they were used to their father’s occasional odd deflections by now, and had long since realized that James Potter was a broken man—and went back to playing in the woods.

James walked back inside, slowly, as if in a haze. He opened the liquor cabinet, pulled out Dumbledore’s most recent present, and had a stiff drink.

“Merlin, Lily, what did you do to them?” he said.

Either his wife had been doing some extremely experimental dark magic or—and here was a dark possibility, something of Voldemort had been left in Clark, and given him the power to fly or—and it struck him, like the meteor had almost struck their house so long ago, and he cursed himself for forgetting, and his previous self’s lack of curiosity.

It was high time they visited Godric’s Hollow and recovered the spaceship that had brought Clark to their home.

He put the bottle of liquor back, and walked back outside to call his sons.

“Boys,” he said, “come inside. It’s time I told you where babies really come from.”

* * *

_Ten years earlier:_

James, Lily, and Harry Potter lived in Godric’s Hollow, under the protection of the Fidelius Charm, a wonderful bit of magic that hid a secret within a soul.

As long as the Secret Keeper refused to speak, no one else would ever learn where the Potters lived. Voldemort was hunting them, and this was their guarantee of safety

James spent most of his time playing with their son Harry, while Lily often buried herself in her studies, researching charms, transfiguration, and magics thought long forgotten. It wasn’t the most even divide, but James knew that Lily’s talents were often academic, while his own lied elsewhere. He hadn’t anticipated being a house-husband when he was young, but it wasn’t as if he could play professional Quidditch with the war on.

There would be a time, they hoped, that their lives would return to normal, and they could live in the outside world once more with their son. Lily often said that her time spent cooped up would prove fruitful, if not exciting, and James was always quick to reassure her that anything that made her gleeful was exciting to him. Then, she would call him an idiot, but with a smile.

If fate had been kind to them, they would have lived out the remainder of the war in hiding, with no disruptions to the order of how things should have been.

Alas, mindless things like gravitation, inertia, and fate did not care about the power of the Fidelius Charm.

It was a day like any other when a great roaring came from the sky.

“What’s the sound?” Lily said, frowning as she looked up from her desk, her wand still in her hand, the faintest wisps of magic lingering in the air like spirits of the wind.

James furrowed his brow even as he bounced baby Harry up and down on his knee. “Smells like fire.”

The two of them shared a glance, and they rushed to their yard, mercifully protected by the Fidelius, James carrying Harry on his left shoulder. An incandescent meteor was plummeting towards their house.

Reflexively, they whipped out their wands. “Protego Totalum!” James shouted. The air rippled as an invisible wall of force extended before them, but there was no guarantee that it would be strong enough to withstand the meteor.

Lily was craftier, and chose a spell more likely to work. “Arresto Momentum!”

The meteor slowed, but it remained red hot until James cast a Cooling Charm. “See, we make a great team,” he said.

Lily rolled her eyes. “That’s why I married you.”

“And here I thought it was because I pursued you for seven years.”

“Harassed, more like,” she said, though it was with a smile. In truth, James had only harassed Lily for five or six years, and spent the seventh being himself.

The thing from the sky didn’t look like a meteor. It was oblong and made of gleaming blue metal with red accents.

“What an odd thing,” said James, brandishing his wand. “Lils, should I?”

Lily said nothing. James looked at her, and realized she’d gone pale. She was chewing her cheek nervously, which was incredibly rare for her.

“Finite Incantatum,” Lily muttered, jabbing at the thing from the sky, to no avail. It didn’t change, the magic passing over the metal oblong shape with no effect. She pointed her wand at her self. “Finite Incantatum.”

“What’s wrong?” James said. “Why’d you try finites?”

“Because, James,” Lily said tersely, “Learning magic was real was a shock, but it was something I’d known was true in my heart. Now, if this was Harry’s accidental magic, I could go on with life without questioning everything I’ve ever known for, again. But since this isn’t some transfiguration, it’s a spaceship. A real spaceship.”

James thought that was absurd. He had seen spaceships in the various muggle moviefilms that Sirius was so fond of. “Don’t spaceships look like teapots?”

“Those are fictional stories, James.”

Lily probably had a better idea of whether it was fiction or not, but James wasn’t going to be outright skeptical when there was a spaceship in front of them, apparently.

“They seemed pretty real to me. How could they fake those things without magic?”

“Science, machines, probably. Or maybe they just used strings.”

“So this thing in front of us… I don’t think there were strings.”

Harry giggled.

James felt a surge of panic when he realized that the giggling wasn’t coming from his left shoulder.

Harry was sitting in front of the spaceship, his chubby fingers smacking against the smooth surface of the metal.

“WHEN did you put him down?” Lily screamed as she rushed towards him.

“I didn’t!” James shouted back as he also rushed forward. “He must’ve apparated!”

“He’s barely 1 years old!”

Yet as they rushed to save their son from the evils of the spacecraft, a door dilated open to reveal another baby, his eyes closed, sucking on his thumb. He had the faintest wisps of dark hair, slightly darker than Harry’s, shaped into the beginnings of a cowlick.

Harry giggled and pointed. The baby opened his eyes, and they were a brilliant blue. He smiled at Harry and giggled too. He crawled out of the spaceship, and soon enough the two were playing patty cake—not an unusual sight among wizarding babies, but still utterly bizarre.

Lily and James watched this strange turn of events, speechless. Lily was the first to recover.

“Well, we’re not naming him Fleamont. Or Charlus,” she said. James’s suggestion died on his tongue.

It was difficult to go from one child to two, especially without a hint of warning or planning.

“Are you sure about this?” James said, a bit of his pureblood upbringing shining through. “I mean— we’ve already got Harry, and two babies? How can we possibly deal with two babies? And also, You-Know-Who is hunting us down. Feel like I should mention that.”

“How hard could it be?” said Lily. “We’ve already got Harry and all the stuff we prepared for him, and You-Know-Who is hunting us down. That’s not going to change. Where could we send him? What else could we do with him? Throw him out of our doorstep and leave him outside of the Fidelius to fend for himself? And the thing is we’ll probably be under the Charm for long enough that we can just say he’s ours or that we had unexpected twins, and no one will ask any questions.”

“What if he’s… well, he fell from the sky. What are the odds that he’s… you know…”

“I thought you were a better man than that, James,” Lily said coldly. “You said you wouldn’t send your children away, even if they were squibs. This would be little different.”

“It’s not that,” said James, even though it was. It was a logical argument, but he had so many doubts. “I don’t know if I can be a good dad for one kid. How could I possibly be a good dad for two—especially if he’s a squib? He’d have to get used to… to the muggle world.”

Lily kissed him. “You’ll do your best, James Potter, and it’ll have to be good enough. As for the muggle world, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

* * *

Life in the Potter household continued as it had before, but with two babies instead of one. This was more work, but through the magic of having nothing else going on in their lives, the Potters managed to walk the delicate balance between sanity and the lack of it.

After some heated discussion, James and Lily decided to name their newfound son Clark. It was a respectable enough British name, and also not ‘all the worst excesses of pureblood culture, distilled into a single name’ as Lily described it.

Now that they had two children, James and Lily split the parenting duties more evenly. When Lily took Harry, he always seemed to sit quietly as she pored over her textbooks and grimoires and practiced her charms. He seemed to drink in every incantation, every swish and flick of the wrist, but that was surely impossible for a one year old—though, Lily reminder herself, wizarding children often had certain affinities towards specific aspects of the world around them, and an unusually smart child would be the very normal kind of impossible that was in short supply these days. James, on the other hand, took a shine to Clark despite his initial misgivings. Although there wasn’t much room to fly in their yard, and at best he could merely hover a few feet above the ground, when he took Clark flying on the broom, the child seemed to love the feeling of defying gravity and having the sun on his face.

They buried the ship in the yard. They had found some sort of record, a crystal that projected the face of a long-dead man, who spoke in a language they couldn’t understand, but who seemed kindly enough to them. Deciphering his language would be a project for after the war, when they could raise Harry and Clark with the love and freedom they deserved.

Lily seemed so busy, her mind abuzz with things James could barely understand. She had taken copious notes about the spaceship, and would often tell James about them at length, describing how the ship seemed to react oddly to magic as if it was drinking in the energy of the spells. But then she would go silent, and a haggard look would enter her eyes, though with a gleam beneath the exhaustion.

James understood where she was coming from. He recognized the look of his wife when he had a plan, but there was a Dark Lord hunting for them, and even the Fidelius could have a weakness. But when he asked her how she felt about that, she seemed completely assured.

“I’m taking care of it,” she would say. “The boys will survive. And I know, James, that you’ll be a wonderful father.”

It was a peaceful time, all things considered. They came to love both their sons as their own flesh and blood. Only later would James wish that he had offered to help a bit more stridently.

* * *

And then came Halloween, and with it, Voldemort.

He announced himself by reducing their front door to a cloud of sawdust, and when he did there was a burst of heat and light in their doorframe. Voldemort screamed in pain, and stumbled around with his wand.

“Go get the boys,” Lily said to James, and he did, reacting on instinct. He ran to the boys’ bedroom. Behind him, he could hear Voldemort yowling, “Step aside, woman! Give me the boy, and I will let you live!”

James grabbed Clark and Harry, bundling them in their blankets and holding them tight in his arms. The door burst open behind them, and he whirled, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to grab his wand to defend himself, but it was only Lily.

“Lils, what do we do?”

She didn’t smile, only a look of harsh determination on her face. “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

“What?”

She kissed him, a short, sad, kiss, and slipped a wooden rod into his shirt pocket before he could react. Then, she snapped it and stepped away.

And James felt a familiar pull on his navel, the jerking of a portkey, as Lord Voldemort stepped into the nursery doorframe.

“Lily, no!” he shouted, but it was too late, he was already being jerked away to some unknown destination.

“Please, not Harry! I’ll do anything!” Lily shouted.

“Step aside, and I will spare you!”

“No, no…”

And James could only watch in silence and terror, from halfway down the portkey’s warp, through a long distorted tunnel that wove through space and time, as Voldemort cast the Killing Curse.

And Lily crumpled.

And then something happened, something that must have been part of Lily’s plan.

The cottage at Godric’s Hollow glowed with magic like a brilliant star.

And all James could see was white.

“Lily! Lily! Lily!” James shouted, hoarse, tears streaming down his face, a baby in each arm. He didn’t know where he was, nor did he care. How could he not have seen it? She had chosen to die, and given him his life—a life he would’ve gladly given for her. He should’ve thrown himself in front of You-Know-Who’s wand, grappled him, done anything instead of being a sitting duck that got sent away…

Someone was grabbing his shoulder. “James, James, you have to calm down! What happened.”

“Sirius,” he gasped. “You-You-Know-Who came to our house. He was going to kill us, but Lily snuck a Portkey onto me and sent me… here. Is this your flat? Maybe if we go quickly we can still save her!”

Sirius looked at him sorrowfully. “You know how fast he is with a wand, James. I’m sorry.”

James sunk into a shabby chair, still crying. Harry and Clark clung to him, wide eyed and silent. “”

Sirius’s face was torn between sorrow, anger, and utmost confusion. “When did you get a second kid?”

“We were in there for nine months, Sirius. Do the math,” said James sarcastically.

“That baby’s at least a year old. He could be Harry’s twin.”

James didn’t answer. Sirius’s shabby flat was an imperfect backdrop for mourning. Every poster on the wall screamed to rebel against society, to strike back at those who hurt you and make them pay.

As he watched his grieving brother, Sirius’s eyes hardened. “Wormtail,” he said.

“Don’t,” said James.

“He betrayed you!” said Sirius. “He betrayed us. He needs to die. A life for a life.”

“And we’ll go through the proper channels,” James said. “I already lost the love of my life. Do you think I want to lose two of my brothers to each other?”

“He’ll pay,” said Sirius, though his brow was furrowed with concern. “He’ll have to.”

“One day. Soon.”

James took in a few heaving breaths, and forced himself to calm down. He had lost a lot, but he was still alive, and his sons were alive.

“James,” said Sirius, “do you know what this means?”

“What?” said James.

“You’re dead.”

“No, I’m not. Lily is,” James said dumbly.

“I’m sorry. But to the Death Eaters, to You-Know-Who’s followers, you’re dead. To Wormtail, you’re dead.”

And then James understood. “This is a chance,” he said, even though his insides tore at him. “Lily—” the pain twisted— “she gave us a chance. I wish she’d told me she had a plan, but she gave us a chance.”

Sirius nodded grimly. “And we’ll take it. Expecto Patronum!”

A silver grim erupted from his wand.

“Go to Albus Dumbledore. Tell him I have a confession to make to him alone, in private, so if he’ll just stay in his office for an hour or so that’d be great.”

James started. “You’re not going in, are you? He thinks you’re the Secret Keeper. They’ll send you to Azkaban.”

“Of course not,” said Sirius. “I’ll send him a Patronus message. After all, I thought I’d only have one godson! You’ve got to introduce me to this little man.”

* * *

Dumbledore’s regal presence was a stark contrast to Sirius’s shabby flat, but the old man sat down comfortably on a half-torn couch and listened attentively as James choked out his memories of the night.

Dumbledore nodded as James stuttered and stopped his story. “It’s alright to grieve, James. You’ve lost a lot.”

“And thank you, Sirius,” he said, “for not doing something incredibly rash.”

Sirius hung his head. “James stopped me,” he admitted.

“Now what,” James said, his voice dull. “I’ve lost almost everything.”

“Hey, I’ll always be here for you,” Sirius said.

It seemed like too much for James. He was barely twenty-one, and he’d lost his wife and his home in a single night. He’d been betrayed by a man he thought a brother, and he was in no state to raise two children alone.

“Is there anyone else who could raise the boys?” James said, looking at Dumbledore. “I… I’m not fit to be a father. I couldn’t save my wife.”

“Lily made her own choices,” Dumbledore said gently. “She would not blame you for her death. It was not your fault.”

“I know,” said James bitterly. “It wasn’t my choice. Still…”

“Would you really give your son to Petunia Evans?”

“Sons.”

“Sons?” said Dumbledore. He gazed at the rudimentary crib made from one of Sirius’s doggy beds. “Sons. May I?”

“Go ahead,” said James dully.

Dumbledore approached the makeshift crib, gave the boys a cursory glance, and then did a double take. “By the Source,” he muttered.

“Is something wrong?” said Sirius.

“No, nothing’s wrong at all,” said Dumbledore. “A powerful magic has settled upon your boys, one I can barely identify. Lily’s doing, I presume.”

“In truth,” he said, sighing, “I am rather regretful I must interrupt your day of mourning with bright news. The world is celebrating.”

“Celebrating?” spat James. “What is there to celebrate?!”

Sirius and Dumbledore shared a look, before Sirius’s expression softened. “He’s dead, James. You-Know-Who is gone.”

She’d done it. Lily had done it, somehow. She’d slain You-Know-Who, and all it had cost was her life. The prophecy that had led them into hiding had mentioned their son, but in the end the mother had slain the final blow. It was all very self-fulfilling, and rather funny, but not in an amusing way.

And James laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was the kind of laugh that stems from pain, that slowly gets more unstable with every passing second, until it’s barely more than a screech in the back of the throat, air forcing itself through lungs, until it’s nothing more than wheezing, and still the laugh won’t stop, until it turns to tears. But he stopped himself, tears in his eyes.

“She did it,” James said. “Lily won. Albus, we won.”

Dumbledore only nodded.

“I’m sorry,” said James. “I… I don’t know what to think. Now what?”

“Ah. That,” said Dumbledore.

“What’s the bad news,” said James.

Dumbledore paused delicately. “They are heralding Harry, the son that they know of, as the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’, the only child to survive Voldemort’s Killing Curse.”

“Albus, we weren’t even there.”

“I know. But the public is… credulous.”

James made a disgusted noise. “It was all Lily. She should be, I don’t know, the ‘Witch-Who-Won’.”

“James, think,” said Sirius. “You-Know-Who’s got sympathizers in the press and the ministry. Do you really think they’d go along with the story that a muggleborn witch who poached a pureblood prince somehow managed to defeat the most terrible Dark Lord we’ve had since Cromwell?”

James deflated. “I guess not. Harry wasn’t anywhere near a Killing Curse.”

“Which leads us to our current predicament,” said Albus. “The world thinks you are dead. Peter Pettigrew must be revealed in a way that keeps you dead, and Sirius safe. Your son is spoken of in great and terrible whispers, as a far more powerful dark wizard than Voldemort himself, and already some seek to raise him as the next great terror.”

“I have two sons.”

“And you must raise two sons, one of whom has not existed before today,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “Not an easy task for any man.”

“So what should I do?”

“Why, you must be dead, my boy,” said Dumbledore. “Go be dead somewhere peaceful or sunny, where the wind is music through the wood and the forests glow in the autumn. Be dead for ten years while Harry is raised by mysteriously defined Muggle relatives who are so Muggle that they have a muggle-ness field that mysteriously stymies any form of inquiry into their existence, as if cast by some meddling old mentor with an inscrutable agenda. And in the meantime, we shall hold the line.”

* * *

_The present:_

“So you see,” James said, “Clark is adopted.”

Clark frowned. “So I don’t look like some relative on mum’s side of the family? The way Harry looks like a younger you?”

“I’m afraid not,” said James. “The truth is, son, I’m not even sure you’re human. And I’m not sure you’re a wizard, either. That’s something we’ll have to ask Dumbledore.”

* * *

**CODA:**

He flew into the ruins of the cottage, his black robes billowing besides him. His foot landed in a man-shaped pile of ash and scattered it to the winds; he paid it no mind. There was no sign of blasted Potter or his spawn—and he suspected the man had abandoned his wife, like a coward.

In fact, there was only one sign any human had ever lived in that twisted ruin.

“No,” he said, collapsing onto his knees before her body.

“No,” he said, even more weakly.

He ran his hands through her red hair, caressed her face, shuddered and looked away as he closed her beautiful green eyes. He pressed his hand to her chest and felt no heartbeat. There was no hope at all.

And there, in the ruins of a cottage in Godric’s Hollow, Severus Snape softly sobbed.

As rain started to fall, sorrow gave way to grief. As rain ceased, grief gave way to loss. As the moon’s beams peered through the clouds, loss gave way to hate and anger and vengeance.

In the ruins of a cottage in Godric’s Hollow, Severus Snape screamed at a world that had taken everything for him as his hatred crystallized into resolve.

“I am **VENGEANCE**! I AM **THE NIGHT**!”

He let slip the animagus form he’d thought sealed deep within himself, let his newfound drive to make things right carry him away on soft, leathery wings.

And a bat flew towards the moon from the ruins of a cottage in Godric’s Hollow.


	2. The Passage of the Years

_1981:_

“Pettigrew.”

“Hello, Narcissa.”

Narcissa Malfoy held up a newspaper. The headline was clear.

_**BLACK BLAMES PETTIGREW! DUMBLEDORE CORROBORATES!** _

Peter blinked. “It’s a lie. Sirius Black betrayed the Potters, not me!”

“How stupid do you think I am? There’s a reason Lucius is sheltering you, and it’s not because you’re a friend to James Potter.”

“You don’t want to do this, Cissy.”

“Oh, but I do,” said Narcissa, wondering how Pettigrew dared call her Cissy. “With the Dark Lord dead, the Malfoys have been freed from his horrible Imperius Curse. And in a show of goodwill, we’ll give the ministry the true traitor. Incarcereous!”

Thick black ropes wrapped around Peter Pettigrew, who only sighed. “Oh, Cissy, Cissy, Cissy. I didn’t know you had a death wish.”

And faster than she could see, he turned small, and scurried forth, and sooner than she could imagine he was upon her, and in his hand he had a knife, and he was stabbing. Stabbing. Stabbing.

She felt it enter her lungs, felt her pain. She thought of her son. Draco.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter. “But soon your pain will be over. Mine will never end.”

And he left her to bleed out there.

So ended Narcissa, daughter of the Moste Ancient and Noble House of Black.

* * *

She was in a world of white. It was King’s Cross, and she was reminded of her own time at Hogwarts, so long ago.

It took her a few moments to realize she was dead, and then she didn’t know whether to cry in hate or rage. Pettigrew had murdered her, the ungrateful little rat, and now it fell to the House of Black to avenge her. She loved Lucius, but she didn’t trust him to murder a puppy. Sirius or Bellatrix, or maybe even Andromeda, would remember their half-loved relative, and think of her mysterious death, and take it out on whoever most deserved it.

But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same as doing it herself.

“Hell hath no furry,” said a rather rough voice, more like a bark.

She looked around. It wasn’t her voice, because she had not spoken. But there was no one else in the ghostly King’s Cross except a black Jack Russel Terrier.

“Yes, it’s me,” said the dog.

“How very droll,” said Narcissa. “A reversed word. It seems that my dying dreams are far more nonsensical than I could have hoped.”

“Sadly you’re not dying, nor is this a dream,” said the dog. “You’re dead.”

If she had been alive, she supposed that she would’ve been angry. The Black Madness was long spoken off in their family. But as she was dead, all she said was, “Unfortunate.”

“Alas,” said the Jack Russel Terrier, “there is too much blood on your hands for you to deserve peace. I cannot offer you a peaceful journey to the next great adventure.”

“I’m sorry,” said Narcissa, as her wits as a magical daughter of the House of Black returned to her, “but with whom am I speaking?”

“I am the Voice,” said the dog, “And I am prepared to offer you a chance to redeem your soul, Narcissa Malfoy.”

“Oh?”

One never took such deals when speaking with mysterious entities. Doing so was a good way to be stuck in the body of your eleven year old self with just enough knowledge of the future to not make a difference. Getting thrown back in time was a fairy tale often told, and Narcissa had always found them horrifying. You would meet the love of your life and know that they would never change, and your children would not be the same unless you conceived at the exact same moment in the exact same way.

“I have a… spirit in similar need of redemption,” the Voice of dog said. “You will return to earth with him upon your soul, and together, you shall Destroy Evil. You will be Wrath.”

“It’s a very kind offer,” said Narcissa, “But I’m afraid I must de—”

“If you decline, your soul will burn in everlasting Hellfire.”

Narcissa had to restrain herself from saying that Christianity was a stupid Muggle lie and that coercion was a dirty Muggle trick.

“Not Christian Hellfire, mind you. Think of it as Hel being so cold that it burns, or being stuck in Tech Duinn so long that it starts to feel like burning. From boredom. Or… eternal separation from the possibility of peace. Yeah. That’s what it is.”

“Who are you the voice of?” She was dead. There was no harm in being direct, unless of course she was burned in magical fire or something for rudeness. The Christian God was known to do such things.

“I am the Voice of a Presence that has long graced this universe, the very Source of all things,” said the dog, “but if it makes you feel better, you can think of me as the voice of Magic.”

Narcissa closed her eyes and opened them again. “I don’t suppose I truly have a choice?”

“No more than Eve did, to eat the apple.”

“God, you’re a dick.”

* * *

He found her cooling corpse on the sitting room floor.

“Dobby!” he said. When he House Elf appeared, he ordered. “Keep Draco away from here. As long as I say so, he is to think that his mother has gone away for some time.”

Only when the elf disappeared with a crack did he fall to his knees. Methodologically, mechanically, he performed the cleaning charms, scouring away the blood. He mended the holes in her garments, and closed her eyes. Only then did he allow a single tear to fall from his eye.

He was Lucius Malfoy, the Malfoy. Proper Purebloods did not cry. They simply did not. It was improper.

And yet this was all so improper, wasn’t it? The Dark Lord was finished, those idiots Bagnold and Fudge were buying his excuse of being under the Imperius Curse, and they had survived the war. They finally had a chance to be a proper Pureblood family, and it was all taken away by a pathetic rat.

It was almost funny, when one thought of it that way.

Slowly, Lucius Malfoy began to laugh. It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was the kind of laugh that stems from pain, that slowly gets more unstable with every passing second, until it’s barely more than a screech in the back of the throat, air forcing itself through lungs, until it’s nothing more than wheezing, and still the laugh won’t stop, and it won’t stop, and it won’t stop, because proper Pureblood men don’t cry, so he can only laugh at it all, how he, the Malfoy, had nothing and then everything and the world and then nothing again, and it’s hilarious and it’s absurd.

Eventually, once his face was tired and his chest was sore, the laugh abated. But inside, he was still laughing.

And the world would laugh with him.

* * *

Borgin was the proprietor of a store of dark artifacts, and was used to unsavory characters trying to fence stolen goods with him, but even still he looked dubiously at the man across from him. “What do you have for me?”

Peter Pettigrew pushed an old diary towards him. “It’s a dark artifact.”

“Indubitably, I’m sure.”

“It is!” Peter squeaked. It was pathetic. “I stole it from the Malfoy’s hoard. How much can you give me?”

“I can take it off of your hands, pretend I never saw you, and alert neither Lucius Malfoy nor the aurors.”

“Surely you can give me something,” Peter pleaded. “I’m a man on the run, and you’re a fence!”

“If you had stolen something golden, I could give you a few galleons,” said Borgin, “but this? It may be a dark artifact, but it’s also a ratty old Muggle diary. I’m doing you a favor for taking it. You can see that, can’t you?”

That was the best offer Peter Pettigrew got, and so it was the offer he took. He scurried out into Knockturn alley, a hood pulled up around his head, scurrying for the safety of the side alleys. It was there that he ran straight into the grasping hand of Lucius Malfoy.

“Pettigrew,” Malfoy drawled, “You took something that was mine.”

“I don’t have it anymore!” Peter squeaked, grateful that he’d given the diary to Borgin. He looked around furtively. They were alone in the side alley. No one was watching, no one cared if they did see anything, and if Malfoy was even slightly smart he’d have put up silencing charms anyways.

If he was lucky, he’d be dead quickly.

“You never did,” Malfoy said, smiling, “And you couldn’t give it back. No magic can bring back the dead, Pettigrew.”

Peter paled. How could he have forgotten? Malfoy wouldn’t be so angry over a Muggle diary.

“What are you going to do to me?” Peter tried to say, but instead he pissed his pants.

Lucius’s wand was out “Scourgify,” he said. “No need for that, Pettigrew,” he said with a smile. “I’m not going to curse you.”

He cast a Cheering Charm. Peter would’ve sagged with relief, if he wasn’t being made abnormally happy by the charm.

“Rather, I shall give you a charmed life,” Malfoy said with a smile. “Rictumsempra.”

And Peter started to laugh.

“Rictumsempra! Rictumsempra! Rictumsempra!”

And Peter kept laughing, and now Lucius was laughing, and the two of them were cackling like madmen, and Peter was starting to hope that maybe, just maybe, things were going to be alright—

“Imperio.”

And now Lucius was only smiling, and a little voice in Peter’s head was telling him not to laugh, but he had to laugh, the charms were making him laugh, so instead he only smiled.

Just a smile.

A large, painful, torn smile.

* * *

Peter walked into the street, out of Diagon Alley into the Muggle world. No one paid him much mind. He was just another homeless man, down on his luck, and there were far too many of those.

There was an undercover Auror on the street corner, just like the little voice in the back of his head was telling him to look for.

He raised his wand, a big smile on his face, and enjoyed it.

“BOMBARDA MAXIMA!”

And he turned into a rat, and fled as the Muggles died.

* * *

_1986:_

Sirius Black never thought he’d end up in the Auror Office. But after Lily’s death, and James’s supposed death, and Peter’s attack on Muggle London, he’d gone to them, saying he wanted to do anything he could to help. Amelia Bones took pity on him and gave him some small investigative tasks, probably filler. But thanks to luck, or fate, or what-have-you, he stumbled upon success, and now he was a full-time Auror with his own desk, own investigation, and own slowly growing rogue’s gallery.

But of course, it wasn’t properly his rogues’ gallery. No, that honor belonged to the Bat.

It was a state secret that there was any connection between Peter Pettigrew and the Laughing Man. It wouldn’t do to have anyone looking too closely at just why Peter was a rat animagus, and who else might be an unregistered animagus, and just how the Laughing Man seemed to appear and disappear at seemingly random and get into rooms sealed save for the appearance of mouse holes. Quite frankly, the math wasn’t in their favor. If they announced that Peter Pettigrew was secretly a rat animagus and not dead and also the Laughing Man, the Auror office would be inundated with calls of people who had funny looking pet rats. It would incite a mass panic, which was quite possibly what Pettigrew wanted. No, the story was that the Laughing Man was an unhinged follower of Voldemort (true), who was significantly more competent than the Lestranges (debatable), with access to Voldemort’s store of dark magic (definitely false), and Peter Pettigrew, while still at large, was just a minor traitor and a definitely guilty Death Eater.

For the most part, the Auror Office’s hands were tied. But there was one man who could operate outside of the law, and this time it wasn’t Albus Dumbledore.

No, it was the Bat. He seemed to hate the Laughing Man more than anyone else, and he heavily implied he knew that the Laughing Man was Pettigrew.

The Bat was scary. There was some charm hiding his voice, and he was always shrouded in the darkness, and at night he seemed to appear and disappear from nowhere. Sirius was winding down a long day of likely fruitless investigation, flicking his wand at the papers on his desk to sort them, when he became aware of a presence in his office.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said.

“Black,” said the voice, somewhat silky smooth, mostly disdainful, somewhat respectful. “Any new leads?”

“I can’t help you,” said Sirius. “Unless you want more evidence that Lucius Malfoy was most definitely under the Dark Lord’s Imperius curse, but he spent his own galleons on all of those dark artifacts, so he won’t be turning them over voluntarily as evidence unless the Ministry can compensate him for the trouble, even though any sane person would want to get unwillingly purchased dark artifacts out of their home.”

“Malfoy’s far too connected even for my copious reach,” said the Bat. “Pettigrew?”

Sirius grimaced. “He’s gone to ground for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s waiting for some sort of sign.”

He glanced over at the Joker crime board. There were a lot of crimes there, most of them not remotely similar. There were random killings of pureblood children, but then there was also petty nuisance actions, like the time he stole the Malfoy heir’s toy broom, and then there was the time he marched down Knockturn Alley boasting about the superior capabilities of his unmentionables. There was no M.O., no connecting thread. A crime by the Laughing Man tended to be funny from a certain point of view, but there was no structure or overarching story. They were all just pointless, meaningless jokes that weren’t all that funny.

“I’ve never liked the idea of Pettigrew as codename: Joker,” said the Bat. Sirius started; he’d thought the Bat would be at least somewhat discrete about the idea. “The man betrays the Potters and then murders for the joy of it? Friends of mine have lost loved ones to him. It’s never random. There’s some pattern. It’s almost always children. This was all planned.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Sirius admitted. “I suggested the switch, and things were fine for months afterwards. Peter planned the betrayal. He waited for the best time to do it. For him to turn around and start committing essentially random crimes…”

“It makes no sense,” said the Bat. “Unless he’s a truly broken man who wishes to see the world suffer as he has…”

“Maybe if he had succeeded,” Sirius said. “I can see him shattering, knowing that he’d killed his best friends and damned us all… I mean, what would that drive a man to? Knowing that a decision you made cost you the people who loved you, who accepted you, and doomed you to whatever mockery of an existence this is? But he failed. He’s not nearly broken enough to turn from what he was before to this. There’s something we’re missing here, but we’re not going to find out what until we catch him.”

“Tell me,” the Bat said after a long, pensive minute. “Is James Potter truly dead?”

“Surely you already know the answer to that question. Do you think I’d be here, instead of rotting in the ground or chasing revenge, if James was dead too?”

Sirius waited for the Bat to say something for a whole minute before turning around. The Bat was gone.

“How does he keep doing that?” he muttered.

* * *

_1988:_

When the Malfoys sat down for dinner, there were three of them: The father, the son, and the holy ghost.

“How was your day, Draco?” said Lucius, as he helped himself to a cut of quail.

“It was horrid,” said Draco. “Why do I have to be friends with Crabbe and Goyle? They’re stupid. They’re so stupid. I asked Crabbe what House he wanted to be in at Hogwarts, and he said Gryffindor seemed like a good excuse to beat Slytherins up and getting praised for it. I don’t want Crabbe to beat me up.”

“All the Houses have their merits,” said Narcissa, as she gently caressed Draco’s hand. “And as a future Slytherin, your job is to see the virtues of all people, so you know where to best help them succeed.”

Draco brightened. “Thanks, mum,” he said.

Lucius spoke as if she hadn’t. “Draco, my son,” he said imperiously, “The Crabbes and the Goyles have served our family loyally for centuries. They have their uses, which you’ll come to see in time. Until them, as a Malfoy, you shall learn to tolerate them until you need them, or like them.”

Draco wrinkled his nose. “But I want real friends.”

“A friend is a gift you give yourself, Draco,” Lucius said. “Remember that, until you appreciate them.”

“You shouldn’t be so cold to him,” Narcissa said. Lucius ignored her.

“Draco, in this life, there are things more important than personal vanity or pleasure. You need to know that.”

“Why do you always do this?” Draco murmured. “Mother says something, and you ignore her to keep lecturing me.”

He was glad he’d gotten the courage to ask this, just this once, but later he reflected that he would never do so again.

“Your mother is DEAD!” Lucius screamed, jumping up from his seat and drawing his wand. He pointed his wand at Draco, his hand wobbling with tension. “She is DEAD, and I won’t have you saying otherwise! This delusion has gone on long enough, Draco! I have tolerated you pretending that your dead mother is at your side, but I will hear NO MORE of it from you! It is a mockery of our family, and what it means to be a Malfoy! No magic can bring back the dead, boy, and I will not participate in your shared hallucination!”

Narcissa got up and grabbed Lucius’s wrist, forcing his wand down. Lucius looked at his hand, and then at her eyes, and then back at his hand, as if he just realized that he’d been about to curse his son. “No more,” he said shakily. “Draco, please excuse me. I am not well. I shall be in my quarters.”

Draco ran to his mother, dinner and decorum forgotten. “Why did he do that,” he sobbed into her robes. “Why did father say all those things? You’re not dead. You’re here!”

Narcissa patted her son’s back, not looking down. “Draco,” she said carefully, “your father saw me… in a very unwell state, and then he thought that I was gone. When I returned to the manor, he had no reason to believe that I was truly well again, and thought it more likely that I was an apparition to taunt him.”

“But you’re not an apparation! I can see you too! I can hold you!”

Narcissa bent down and looked her son in the eye. Oh, the future ahead of him. She hoped he would never cross her path in her other guise. “Draco, things are not always as they seem.”

“If you’re not my mother why hasn’t father banished you from here?” said Draco. “Why hasn’t he exorcised you like a ghost?”

“Because perhaps he knows I am something more than the meanest ghost,” said Narcissa, “or perhaps he thinks me merely a harmless folie a deux. Best not to worry about it, Draco.”

And as a mother’s words tend to do, Draco was soothed, and didn’t think about it much more. He would spend some time with his father, who was respectable and very kind, and some time with his mother, who was just as loving, even if the newspapers always wrote she was dead, and his father was a widower.

* * *

Narcissa stalked through Knockturn Alley, drawn by a call to vengeance. Her skin was paler than a ghost’s, and she wore a cape and hood of deepest green. She was a Spectre of Vengeance, given purpose by the Great Beyond to wreak punishment upon the sinful.

Of course, she wasn’t omniscient. In most cases she had to know that someone had actually done wrong. It was just luck that she’d heard Augusta Longbottom ranting about how they’d never found dear Alice’s pearls, and how she’d never trusted that Mundungus Fletcher. A quick consultation with the Almighty, and Narcissa knew it to be true.

She saw her quarry, framed in shadows cast by oil lamps upon the shop tills.

“Mundungus Fletcher,” she said, and her voice boomed through the alley but disturbed no one. It was meant for him alone. “You have sinned.”

“Twasn’t me. Someone else,” Mundungus muttered. “You got the wrong person, lady.”

“The Bones. The Prewetts. The Longbottoms. You stole from their estates moments after the Death Eaters ended their lives or their sanities.”

“Twas just a bit of re-appropriation, is all,” said Mundungus. “Weren’t like they was going to use the jewels after dying.”

“You have sinned,” said Narcissa, and her voice grew deeper, and she cast a green fire about her. “You have coveted, and stolen. You have desecrated the sanctity of death.”

“Oh, come on,” said Mundungus. “They were dead! It weren’t like they could care!”

“You who value such shiny things…” said Narcissa, a grim smile upon her face. “Yet cannot value virtue. You shall live up to your name.”

She raised her hand. Mundungus tried to run, but found he couldn’t move his legs. The smell of feces was getting stronger. Mundungus looked down, a look of horror upon his face, as he found his legs had turned to literal piles of human excrement.

“What? No! No! Dumbledore’ll find me! He’ll turn me back!” Mundungus wailed. “Help! Someone help! ANYONE, help!”

But as is often the case in Knockturn Alley, his pleas were ignored.

He kept wailing and screaming and gnashing his teeth as slowly, all of his body was turned to feces.

Then, Narcissa raised her hand, and used the magic of creation to polish the turd.

The next morning, the residents of Knockturn Alley found a statue that gleamed as if it were polished bronze, but that was clearly made of shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the New 52, there was a period in which the Presence -- essentially the DCU's version of God -- was represented by a Jack Russell Terrier.


	3. Discoveries

James threw floo powder into the fire, and it burned emerald green. “Headmaster’s Office, Hogwarts,” he said clearly.

Dumbledore’s face appeared from the fire.

“James,” he said. “Have you begun preparations for Hogwarts? We can have your books delivered so you will only need to Floo to Ollivander’s for the boys’ wands.”

“I was hoping to speak to you, actually,” James said. “I’d like to hear the full prophecy.”

The prophecy had driven James and Lily into hiding with Harry. Dumbledore had been vague with the details, only saying that a prophecy had led him to believe that Voldemort might target them, and that it was best that they hide in a way that could only be defeated by a suitably metaphorical failing.

At the time, James had thought that was an odd request, but now, years after the sting of Pettigrew’s betrayal, he understood.

“I admit, I am surprised it took you so long to ask,” Dumbledore said. “May I ask why the delay?”

“A year or two of grief, and then the issue of raising two boys alone,” James said. “But now I don’t think I can ignore it any longer.”

Dumbledore nodded. “Come through,” he said.

Once James was on the other side, Dumbledore bade him to sit down.

“Has Clark shown signs of magic?” Dumbledore said.

“He did,” James said. “He can fly unaided. I was concerned at first that he wouldn’t, but my fears were unfounded. Clark is no squib.”

This was possibly a lie. Wizards couldn’t usually fly unaided. It was possible that Clark had come from somewhere else, and that gave him the power to fly. But James really didn’t know. Lily would’ve, since she’d known much more about spaceships, but Lily was dead.

“Curious indeed,” Dumbledore said. “Now, I suppose…”

He stood and walked up to his pensieve, swirling the wispy silver memories with his wand. James was transfixed for a second by Dumbledore’s chair, which had glowing vertical lines of silvery blue running through the wood, a similar color to that of the pensieve memories.

“Observe,” Dumbledore said, as the wispy figure of a woman arose from the pensieve. “The True Prophecy of Sibyl Trelawney.”

James strained to hear, but frankly he felt that it barely helped.

_The one with the power to vanquish the Dark side approaches…_

_Borne to those who have thrice defied them, born like the falling stars fly…_

_And the Darkness will mark him as an equal, but he will have power the Dark knows not…_

_And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…_

_The one with the power to vanquish the Darkness will be borne as the Hidden World dies…_

“I hate prophecies,” James said. “Hidden world dies? That could have been anyone in magical Britain, given the war.”

“Indeed,” said Dumbledore. “It was the thrice-defiance that led me to urge you and the Longbottoms to go into hiding, and the recency of your births. There have been scant few wartime births. But no— the ‘falling stars fly’, I took to refer to a set of meteor showers that occurred a scant few days before Harry and Neville’s births. And I am still not certain of the wording of the prophecy.”

“You’ve had a decade to figure it out, and nothing’s obvious to you?”

“Interpretation is non-trivial,” Dumbledore said gently. “Half the phrases are metaphorical, and several words are homophones that have multiple meanings. Voldemort knows only the first part of the prophecy, and so would not know that he is doomed to mark the one destined to defeat him.”

“Voldemort didn’t get anywhere near the boys,” said James. “Lily made sure of that.”

“Indeed,” Dumbledore said. “So he will come for them, seeking to destroy them, and in that time he is sure to mark them. The prophecy would be but a dead whisper of malign hypertime, if not for his ignorance and his drive.”

“And there’s nothing you can do?”

“What can I do, but nothing?” Dumbledore said. “The world thinks that Voldemort is as dead as you are. They think him forgotten. If I were to agitate against him… there is much that could fail, much that could go wrong, much that could turn the wizarding world upon you as much as him.”

“Help my sons become strong enough to stand against him,” said James.

“I am the headmaster of Hogwarts, James,” Dumbledore said. “I can’t show favoritism to two students, no matter how famous they may be.”

“Then let them become strong,” James said. “One way or another. Prepare them. Because I’m not as strong as I’d like to be, and my sons deserve better.”

Dumbledore nodded slowly. “I will try not to overstep my bounds,” he said. “But I will see what can be done. Your sons will run the gauntlet at Hogwarts.”

James let out a breath he hadn’t know he was holding. “Thank you, Albus. Make sure their education is exciting, because I doubt they’ll get normal lives anyways.”

James, Harry, and Clark had returned to Godric’s Hollow, for the first time since Halloween all those years ago.

The cottage was gone. Whatever magic Lily had wrought had reduced it to a smoking wreck, which time had long since returned to nature. Now, only a few oddly shaped boulders gave any hints that there had been a dwelling there at all. Dumbledore had pulled a few strings to make sure that the area would be clear of any other visitors today, allowing the rumors of their death to continue a bit longer.

James pushed open the gate, but paused for a second. Clark looked at the gate, and realized with some surprise that he could read the tiny inscribed words from three feet away.

_“Thank you Harry—you saved us all”_

_“Many blessings, Harry Potter”_

_“Harry Potter—Savior”_

Clark furrowed his brow. He’d heard dad mention that Harry was celebrated as the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’—even though all the work had been mum’s, and the three of them had been cast out of danger by her quick thinking. Clearly, the wizarding world thought different. Dad had tried to keep them from much of the madness of the wizarding world; when they’d interacted with other people, it had been mostly the muggles in nearby villages, who thought of them as charming expats.

“Are these about me?” Harry said. “How very pitiful. I’ve never saved so much as a cat in a tree.”

Clark wiggled his eyebrows at Harry, and Harry smirked back. Clark knew that his brother didn’t mean it. Harry could be incredibly sarcastic at times, but he was usually a stand-up bloke.

“Well, you know how rumors get,” James said. “We vanished for a decade right as You-Know-Who died. So, you’ll run into people with some very strange ideas.”

“I like the sound of that one,” Harry said, pointing at the inscription that said “Savior.”

“It sure would be nice to help so many people,” Clark said, “That they start to think of you as a savior. But that sounds like it would be hard for one man to do.”

“Come off it, Clark,” Harry said. “Are you really telling me that you wouldn’t want to be the one to save the world?”

“Of course I’d want to save the world. Doesn’t mean I’d want them to call me the savior.”

“It’d be a nice perk of it.”

“Well,” James said, putting a firm hand on his sons’ backs. “I’m proud you both have such noble ambitions. Now come on. There’s a spaceship waiting.”

James pulled out his wand, lifting patches of dirt into the air in a grid, until he saw the gleam of alien metal. “Alright, that’s the ship,” he said. He tried casting a levitation charm on it, but it didn’t seem to work. The ship shook a bit, shimmying a few inches higher into the air, but ultimately falling back to the ground.

“We may need to pull it out by hand,” James said, wiping his brow.

“Let me see what I can do, pop,” Clark said. He knelt by the spaceship, brushing aside the dirt carefully. The metal was cold beneath his hands, yet oddly comforting, and it seemed to whir to life as he touched it.

James motioned Harry to help Clark, but before either of them could move, Clark pulled the spaceship from the ground with his bare hands. It was surprisingly easy to him — the ship felt as light as a feather in his hands. He held in in the air for a second, casting a shadow upon the three of them, dirt and grass sloughing off of the smooth metal exterior, before gently placing it on the ground.

“That’s how you came to us,” James said after a moment. He seemed to be in faint shock.

“It’s nice to know mum’s books are wrong on two fronts,” Harry said sarcastically. “Magic is real, and so is extraterrestrial life.”

Clark was in awe. He ran his hands across the smooth metal reverently, his fingers splaying out, as if he wanted to feel every inch of the spaceship that had been his first cradle. The metal was cold beneath his fingertips, but it seemed almost alive, as if it had been awaiting his touch for so many long years.

The spaceship started to vibrate, a sweet hum like music permeating the air, harmonious bands of sound all layering upon one another. Light started flickering, white and blue and red meshing together. Clark closed his eyes, and stepped back. He was barely aware that he was starting to float into the air, basking in the afternoon sun, as the spaceship’s systems whirred to life.

“Clark, son, get back—” James said with some panic.

“Look,” Harry said, interrupting their father. “Up in the air.”

In the flashing light, floating above the metal spaceship, was the visage of an elderly man, an image of a ghostly head enlarged to the size of a boulder. His face was pale, but his jawline was distinct. His hair was white, though not from age, for his pale skin was barely marred with the slightest wrinkles. His eyes were the same brilliant blue as Clark’s though there was something cold and distant in his gaze.

And Clark stared. He thought of James as his father, but there was something undeniably familiar about this man.

James took out his wand. “What are you?” he said, his voice hoarse. Clark knew that his father had seem terrible things in the war that he never spoke about, and now he was acting as if the war had never ended.

The ghostly head turned towards him. Its mouth was moving, and the music was growing strong, yet notes of dissonance started to creep in, shattering the harmony, introducing static, until the the head started speaking words.

“—I am a copy of the mind of Jor-El of Krypton, son of Seyg-El, recorded in crystal memory. Internals suggest eleven local solar cycles have passed since this unit was last active.”

“A copy of a mind,” James said. “What about your soul?”

“My people believe that our essences transmute to pure solar consciousness upon death,” said the ghostly face of Jor-El. “And by now, my true self is surely dead. I am but knowledge and structure in crystal; I cannot change or grow. I merely advise.”

“Like a portrait, then,” James said.

“I am unfamiliar with portraiture technology at such a level,” the face said, “but the analogy is apt.”

Clark floated upwards until he was at eye level with Jor-El. “Are you… my father?” he said, his voice slow, reverent, hopeful. He glanced at James. The man had a hurt look on his face, but when he saw Clark glancing at him he gave him an encouraging smile.

Jor-El glanced briefly at James before speaking. “I am a memory of your biological father. You are Kal-El, my only son, and the last son of Krypton.”

“And can you… could you fly?”

“No,” Jor-El said. “Krypton was an old and dying world orbiting an ancient and red sun. Our cells adapted to absorb energy in abundance whenever it was available. Here, underneath the light of this earth’s yellow sun, you shall find yourself capable of feats far beyond those of mortal men.”

Clark looked at his hands, and then at the face of his biological father. “I have so many questions,” he said. “And I have no idea where to begin.”

Harry would have questions, he was sure, but Harry wasn’t asking them. His brother was so very inquisitive at times, and often too curious for his own good. It was almost suspicious how quiet he was being.

“Why did you send your only son away?” James asked, mercifully asking the questions for Clark.

“I had no choice,” Jor-El said. “And as the father who raised him, you have every right to judge me. My world, Krypton, was dying, and no one would listen to the warnings I sounded in their decadence and arrogance. So I placed him in a spacecraft and sent him to your world. To Earth. A place primitive in technology by our standards, but one full of life and vitality, of passion and hope, where I hoped that a kindly couple might find him and raise him as their own.”

“I tried my best,” James said. “I’m afraid my wife has long since passed.”

“You’re a great father,” Clark said, lowering himself to the ground so he would be looking up at James. He gave Harry an exaggerated wink.

Harry rolled his eyes. “You really are, dad,” Harry said.

“You were a father,” Jor-El said. “That is more than I can say of biological self. I sent him into the universe with only the slightest, faintest hope, away from certain death. That was all I could do. My warnings fell on deaf ears, and my wife would not leave me to die alone. Yet I can see that you have raised him with care. For that, I thank you.”

“I taught him what I could about being a good man,” James said. “I don’t think it was enough. I’m… I’m barely a good man myself. I’ve lost too much, and I’m a shadow of the hero I tried to be.”

“That alone is more than I had ever dreamed,” Jor-El said. “Even pain and loss so early was more than Krypton taught. Now, Kal-El, I would speak to you alone.”

Clark nodded.

“Touch your hand to this crystal,” Jor-El said, as a hatch on the spaceship dilated open with no obvious mechanism. A thin, clear crystal slid forth.

Clark touched the crystal, and the world went white.

“Welcome,” said Jor-El. His voice was higher and less sonorous, and more tired.

Clark opened his eyes, and looked around him. He was in a world of smooth contours and polished surfaces. There was a window that looked down upon a landscape of crystal spires jutting out from a glossy landscape, all illuminated by the red light of an eternal sunset.

“Who am I?” Clark said.

“Your name is Kal-El,” Jor-El said. “You are the only survivor of the planet Krypton. Even though you’ve been raised as a human, you are not one of them. You have great powers, only some of which you have as yet discovered.”

“So I’m not human,” Clark said.

“Not in biology,” Jor-El said. “As for identity, that is a matter for philosophers.”

He offered nothing more, and walked to the window, stretching his hands out towards the red horizon.

“Is this place… Krypton?” Clark said.

“A memory of it,” said Jor-El. “Our homeworld, and the place you were born. A thousand years more advanced than earth in science. When you look upon it, what do you think?”

Clark looked out the window, at the contours of the room that seemed far too smooth, at the floating vehicles zipping through the distance. It was a far cry from the Potter home, which was small and cozy, but this place seemed almost too perfect. But he wasn’t going to tell that to Jor-El.

“You said earth was primitive,” Clark said. He wasn’t sure how much he liked this man, who claimed to be his biological father.

“I did,” said Jor-El. “And that, I hoped, would be a blessing. So that you might grow up beneath a young, yellow sun, and spend your childhood in idle play and joyful labor. You would need that advantage to survive, an orphan cast to fate. The atmosphere would sustain you, and you would defy earth’s gravity. You look like one of them, but are not one of them. Your cellular structure makes you strong, fast, and virtually invulnerable.”

“And the last,” said Clark, keeping his voice calm. “The last of people like me?”

“You are not alone,” Jor-El said, turning to Clark, though he did not move to embrace him. “You will never be alone. You have traveled far, my Kal-El, but we will never leave you, even in the face of death. All that I have… all that I am… I bequeath unto you, my son. I give you my strength, and my life through your eyes. All I can send you, I have, Kal-El.”

Clark felt… he wasn’t sure how to feel. He wasn’t normal, but neither were James and Harry. They weren’t muggles. He’d almost never displayed accidental magic himself, to the point where he almost felt like James had looked upon him with pity. He had started to worry that he might be a squib, but he hadn’t even considered that he might not even be human.

That was worse than he could have imagined, to not be human at all.

Jor-El had come closer to him. “You are pained.”

“I’m not like them,” Clark said. “But I always thought I was. I always lived like I was. I always dreamed that I would grow up to do my part for the world, because it was my world.”

“That was what I intended,” Jor-El said. “You can do more than them, that is true, but you must live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed—because I have no doubt that it is. But always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El, and they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I sent them you… my only son. That you might do for this world what I failed to do for mine, to be an inspiration, and lead them to a greatness without letting them fall to coldness. So tell me, my son, what do you think of Krypton?”

Clark looked at it again. He felt a sense of deep melancholy, that this was the place where he would belong, that he had been cast from… and yet, looking at how small it all was from Jor-El’s home, how bright and beautiful yet cold it was, he couldn’t help but shudder.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s… not cozy. It seems…”

“Cold,” Jor-El said. “Sterile. Arrogant.”

“…yeah,” Clark said. He wasn’t sure if Jor-El would approve of him saying that. But to his surprise, Jor-El smiled.

“It warms my heart to hear you say that, my son, for it shows that though you may be the last son of Krypton, you have grown as a son of Earth. Now, turn your gaze to the wall behind us.”

Clark turned around. He blinked. There was a giant shield-shape on the wall, with a stylized-S on it.

“It looks like an S,” he said, bewildered.

“On Krypton, this is the sigil of the house of El,” Jor-El said, his voice sounding oddly distant. “It is the symbol of our ancient heritage, and I hope one day you will bear it proudly.”

The room was starting to dissolve into a haze, but the symbol remained clear.

“Remember, Kal-El,” said Jor-El’s voice, now echoing as if from very far away, “we are always with you.”

* * *

It was a bit dumb for dad to insist on going to Ollivander’s, in Diagon Alley, but Harry knew emotion and sentimentality drove people to do far stupider things.

James had cast some simple charms on himself and Harry to turn their hair a few shades lighter and to darken their glasses. They were also wearing hats. This would allow them to maintain the fiction that James Potter was dead.

Harry had no idea why they were still doing this.

“So our cover story,” Clark said, for the umpteenth time, “is that you died along with mum when we were babies, so we were raised by our mean Aunt Petunia?”

“That’s right,” James said.

Clark had passed out for five minutes upon touching the spaceship, but he’d recovered remarkably well. He’d been oddly insistent on leaving the ship at Godric’s Hollow. Harry wished they could’ve brought it home with them so he could study it in detail.

Harry raised an eyebrow. “And this was necessary so you could perform the important work of appearing to be dead?”

“Hey, I never planned on being a single father to two boys,” James said. “You going to tell me I did a shite job of that?”

“You did the best you could,” Clark said. He’d been introspective ever since the spaceship.

“Other than the day-drinking in your office, you did a pretty good job,” Harry said.

“Look, that day-drinking is what helped me seal all those business deals,” James said. “We have a business interest in half the shops in Diagon Alley, boys. You’ll never have to do an honest day’s work in your lives if you don’t want to.”

“That’s a terrible thing to tell two eleven-year-olds,” Harry said wryly. “Didn’t Uncle Sirius run away from home because of all the entrenched business interests the Blacks had?”

“I thought Uncle Sirius ran away from home because his parents were arseholes,” Clark commented casually.

James cleared his throat. “Well, I hope I was a better parent than Walburga Black. Let’s get your wands.”

They didn’t have any real reason to visit other shops. They didn’t need robes, because they had plenty at home, and they didn’t need too many textbooks, because Harry had begged to buy most of the Hogwarts curriculum early, and Lily had apparently charmed her entire library to appear in their Gringotts vault at the moment of her death. So even though most of their belongings had been destroyed on that fateful Halloween, they’d come up with replacements simply because the children needed them. Harry supposed it was for the better. The more time they spent out here in Diagon, the more likely they would be recognized.

“Wait a minute,” Harry said. “How on earth did you manage to get a business interest in half of the shops in Diagon Alley while also pretending to be dead?”

“Ah. Well, Sleekeazy Conglomerate owns the business interest. I’m the power behind the throne, a silent partner that no one knows about.”

“I thought Grandpa Flea sold Sleekeazy’s?” Clark said.

“He sold the product and the supply chain, but not the name,” James said. “It’s complicated. It’d be like if Ollivander trained up an apprentice and taught them everything to know about wands and retired to sell Ollivander’s ice cream instead and let them keep using the name. Speaking of which…”

They entered Ollivander’s wand store. There were several stories, but no exposed walls. Every wall was filled floor-to-ceiling with racks filled with wand upon wands.

“Howdy there,” James said. “I’m new to all this, and I’m here to get my sons wands for their first days at Hogwarts!”

Ollivander was a wispy old man with full-moon glasses. He walked up to James and stared at him. James started to look uncomfortable. He broke eye contact.

“James Potter,” said Ollivander after a second, in a raspy voice. “In the flesh. Eleven inches, mahogany, pliable. Excellent for Transfiguration.”

James sputtered, surprised that their disguises had been so easy to see through, but Ollivander paid him no further heed. He bent over to stare at Harry. Harry understood why James was uncomfortable. It was as if Ollivander was peeling back the layers of his self, to reveal his very soul. Harry dropped his eyes to Ollivander’s feet.

“Harry Potter,” Ollivander said, after a second. “No scar—I see that now. But you have your mother’s eyes.”

“Scar?” Harry said.

James cleared his throat. “Harry, you know how British wizards think you stopped You-Know-Who as a baby?”

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice,” Harry said. James had mentioned it briefly and vaguely.

“Well, part of that is that when You-Know-Who cast the Killing Curse at you, it rebounded off of you but left you with a lightning-shaped scar.”

“…That’s just stupid,” Harry said after a second of mental processing. “The whole point of the Killing Curse is that it always works and that it doesn’t leave any marks.”

“What a remarkable grasp of dark magic, for someone so young,” Ollivander said dryly.

James winced. “That’s my fault. I gave him free reign of Lily’s old books.”

“Quite amazing that her spellbooks survived the destruction of your home at Godric’s Hollow.”

“She was a remarkable witch,” James said wistfully. “Even after all these years, she’s still surprising me.”

Ollivander then turned to Clark. “And you… you must be a secret Potter.”

“I’m Clark.”

Ollivander stared at Clark. Clark stared back. Then, Ollivander broke his gaze and turned to the wall of wands. “Two wands, then… two wands for two brothers. Both, perhaps, of this world and yet not of it…”

“What do you mean?” Harry said.

“You were borne to exile, on that fateful Halloween,” Ollivander said, pausing from his examination of his wands. “You are of the wizarding world, yet you were raised with little knowledge of it, on a distant periphery to the ten years of this recent chaos. Perhaps that is best. Perhaps that kept you alive. As for the son of El, I would think the meaning of my words is obvious.”

He then turned back to the wall of wands, riffling through them.

“How on earth—” Harry said.

“Yeah, what—”

“Ollivander is someone that seems to know many things he shouldn’t,” James said in a low voice. “But he’s never done anything untoward or criminal. As the premier wandmaker in Britain, he has certain duties.”

But Harry had narrowed his eyes. “Legilimency.”

“Correct indeed,” said Ollivander, turning to them with two boxes. “Try these on for size.”

“Legilimency?” Clark asked. Harry knew his brother hadn’t been as much of a bookworm as he had.

“Mind-reading,” Harry said. “Which is some form of privacy intrusion, I’m sure. Dad, for my birthday I’d like to start Occlumency training.”

James sighed. “Everyone overlooks Ollivander’s legilimency because it’s minimal and because he knows so much wandlore that he could infer the entirety of your personality off of how five wands react to you. But yes, Harry, that can be your birthday present.”

Harry and Clark took the wands that Ollivander was offering, but just as quickly he snatched them away. “Hmmm, no,” he said. “Terrible fit on both ends.”

“So what did you learn from my head?” Clark said.

“Not too much,” Ollivander said. “Merely that you’re adopted and that someone has installed a potent mental barrier in your mind. Someone wants you to keep their secrets.”

Harry instantly knew that this must’ve had to do with how Clark had passed out. Of course, he wasn’t an idiot. There was a spaceship and Clark had been sullen for about ten minutes or so, afterwards. Logically, that meant Clark was a space alien, and that the spaceship and Jor-El, Clark’s real dad, didn’t want the rest of the world to know about it.

That suited Harry just fine. Carl Sagan could convince the planet that space aliens were cool, while he could do the real work in the shadows and profit off of both magic and technology. He’d been born into certain advantages — knowledge of magic, and a mother, albeit passed, who was really good at magic, and fate had given him solid proof that alien life was real.

“Perhaps counterpoles,” Ollivander said. He disappeared back into his shop and came back with two more wands. “Now, if the two of you would stand at opposite ends of the room…”

Those wands weren’t of much use either, and so Ollivander vanished again.

“Hey, Harry,” Clark whispered. “You know about wands, right? Why is this so complicated?”

“It’s because the wand chooses the wizard, Clark,” James said. “Surely I’ve mentioned that.”

“You have,” Clark said. “But I don’t get what that means. Is there a mind in each wand? Is there some magic spirit connecting all wands and relaying instructions?”

Harry didn’t actually know, but the premise of the question gave him pause. Why on earth would Clark wonder that?

“Not so much,” Ollivander said, returning stealthily from the backroom of his shop. “It is close to what one might refer to as instinct or reflex in humans. The material of the wandcore, you see, responds to the natural outpouring of magic from the witch or wizard. A child with natural magic will release it through the channel, once provided, and some wands let the flow happen easier than others. Of course, there are some children born to magical parents who cannot utilize magic at all…”

Harry knew what Ollivander was talking about. He was suggesting that Clark was a squib. Of course, if Ollivander knew the truth, he would be suggesting that Clark was a muggle outright. But he wasn’t going to out his brother.

“Oh, is that it?” Clark said, and he held out his hand for another wand as Harry took one as well.

Clark’s wand exploded in his hand.

“Not out of the ordinary, but such odd timing!” Ollivander said, as he collected Harry’s wand and the shards of Clark’s. “You are uninjured, Mr. Potter?”

Clark shrugged. “Lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky indeed,” Ollivander said, before disappearing again. He returned with two wands that he held gingerly.

“Now these wands are quite special,” said Ollivander. “This one for Harry, and this for Kal.”

Harry took the wand. It tickled his magic, but did not draw it out further. Clark touched his wand, but his fingers spasmed, and he dropped it. “It feels odd,” he said.

“Ah,” Ollivander said, suddenly animated, the gleam of clarity in his eye. “Perhaps you ought to switch wands.”

Harry and Clark shared a glance, suddenly uneasy, but they accepted the wands as Ollivander swapped them.

The moment Harry grasped the wand, it crackled to life. It was as if jolts of electricity were surging through his skin, as if his willpower and his knowledge were concentrated in his wand. This was right; his arm was complete again. He smirked, and glanced over at Clark, only to see with shock that Clark seemed to be glowing with faint golden light.

“A most interesting match…” Ollivander mused.

“What’s going on, Garrick?” James said. “That’s a stronger reaction from the both of them than I’ve heard of.”

“It’s not completely out of the ordinary for wizards,” Ollivander said. “No, I speak of the wands themselves. The wand that has chosen Harry is holly, with a core of a mysterious glowing stone that I was led to by a bowtruckle. But the wand that has chosen Kal… why, it shares its core with but one other wand. The phoenix that donated its feather to the wand gave only one other feather in its lifetime… and that brother wand belongs to the Dark Lord.”

Ollivander fixed Clark in his eyes again. “I think you are doomed to a most interesting fate, Kal Potter,” he said.

Harry was perfectly fine with that. His successes would be on his own power. He didn’t need fate or destiny to succeed, no matter what, even if wizarding Britain thought that he was fated to be a hero from doing stuff as a baby. But Ollivander had words for him as well.

“And you, Harry Potter… you will show us great things. Great, otherworldly things. Yet I suspect fate is playing a trick on you as well.”


	4. The Hogwarts Express

_**PROLOGUE: THE WEEK BEFORE** _

“Minerva,” said Albus Dumbledore, from his glowing chair, “I need you to retrieve the Philosopher’s Stone from Gringotts. It is in vault 713.”

“Understood,” said Minerva McGonagall, wearing slim black robes. She waited for Albus to give her the key. He did not.

“…are you going to give me the vault key?”

“There is no key,” Dumbledore said. “It’s one of those goblin vaults that sucks you in if you touch it wrong.”

“What about a letter of authorization?”

“I think it best if the goblins remain ignorant that I bypass their security.”

“Albus…”

“However, it recently came to my attention that the goblin vaults can be bypassed by beings of a very specific persuasion. A feline persuasion, as it were. And you, Minerva, are conveniently some sort of cat-woman.”

“…I hate you, Albus.”

“No, you don’t. See you tomorrow.”

“What is this, some sort of suicide-mission?”

* * *

Soon the day to go to Hogwarts was almost upon them, when the Potters would go to Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross. Not all of the Potters, of course. James was going to continue to pretend to be dead, so it would just be Clark and Harry, the previously unknown Potter twins, with their meticulous cover story about having been raised in the muggle world.

“Tell me again why this is necessary?” Harry said, as they were preparing the night before. The boys were packing all their belongings into some modestly-sized suitcases, and Harry was agonizing over which books would be absolutely necessary to bring.

James frowned. “I’ve told you, son. The longer that the world thinks I’m dead, the better the mystique of the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’ will last.”

“Because it’s really going to last more than five minutes after two Potters step foot onto Platform 9 3/4,” Harry said sarcastically. “Because the world won’t realize instantly that maybe they don’t know the whole story.”

“People will believe what they want,” said James. “You would be amazed at how easy it is to spread rumors when they sound like something that people want to believe. When they make them feel like they’re in the know, even if they’re just blatant lies. Clark, are you alright?”

Clark had been staring at his wand, but he jerked back to awareness. “Yeah, pa. I’m fine.”

“What’s bothering you?” Harry said.

“I’m just… I’m just surprised that a wand chose me at all,” Clark said. He twisted the wand delicately in the air. “I’m surprised I could feel the magic.”

“What do you mean?” James said.

“Well, I heard you crying to mum’s photos that you were afraid I was a squib,” Clark said. “I guess not. And well, I am from another world.”

“I thought I put up quieting charms whenever I was crying,” James said. “Sorry, son. You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

Harry noted that down. He already knew that Clark could fly, but now apparently Clark could hear extremely quiet sounds. There certainly was a lot to this ‘Kryptonian’ business that he didn’t quite understand.

“Anyways,” Harry said. “What I was actually asking about is why this whole ‘Hogwarts Express’ nonsense is necessary. We’re in Germany. A portkey or a Floo to London isn’t any cheaper or faster than one to Scotland. I know we already have a Floo connection to the Headmaster’s office, I’ve seen you use it.”

“Oh, it’s a time honored tradition,” James said. “It’s a way to catch up with friends in an informal setting. The first people you meet on the train your first year can shape the course of your destiny.”

“Really?” Harry asked skeptically.

“That’s where I first met your mother,” James said.

“Yeah, and then you spent seven years in a castle with her,” Harry said. “You were going to see her eventually.”

Clark started chuckling, then he winked at Harry. Harry smirked back.

“It’s a social experience. Try to make a few friends on the train. Honestly, it’s superb you both turned out so well with a disaster of a father like me,” James said. “It’s hard to believe that in less than a day you’ll both be at Hogwarts and sorted and…”

“Where do you think we’ll get sorted into?” Clark said.

“It doesn’t really matter,” James said after a moment. “They’re just school Houses. There are bullies and traitors in Gryffindor, and brave men in Slytherin, and it’s only for seven years.”

Was Harry imagining things, or was James speaking only to him about this? As if he knew that Harry was already planning not to end up in Gryffindor.

“I’ll be proud of the both of you, no matter where you end up.”

* * *

The next day, Platform 9 3/4 was as busy as Harry had expected it to be. He and Clark had used the Floo Network to travel directly to the platform without needing to travel through Muggle London. Currently they were passing time on the platform, watching as everyone else struggled to get their trunks onto the train.

Harry was wearing a hat, and had darkened his glasses using a charm James had taught him. Clark had taken no such precautions, because there he didn’t look like a Potter.

“Are you really going to lie low?” Clark said, his voice low.

“Whatever do you mean, brother mine?” Harry said.

“I saw how you acted at Godric’s Hollow,” Clark said. “When you saw the gate. ‘Savior’? Really? I half expected you to walk around declaring how you’d saved everyone. ‘Hi everyone, I’m the boy who lived. I’ll be your friend and in return you just have to like me.’”

This seemed profoundly stupid to Harry.

“Give me some credit. If I went around claiming that, the only words I’d hear would be ‘wow’ and ‘how’. I would prefer slightly more stimulating conversation. And I’m not going to take credit for mum’s work. I intend to make something of myself without taking credit for whatever foul sorcery she used.”

Clark rolled his eyes. “Mum’s notes never made sense to me so I’ll take your word for it. So you already have a long-term plan. Already angling to get into Slytherin?”

“Pa would piss himself, wouldn’t he?”

“He’ll blame himself for not being a better father, more like. You know how he gets.”

Harry frowned. His brother had a very, very strong moral center. “Are you going to tell me to—”

“If you get into Slytherin, I won’t love you any less,” Clark said. “And pa… he sounded like he’s kind of expecting it. You heard him last night. I’m not going to lie, Slytherin would be pretty cool, but… can you imagine? The ‘Boy-Who-Lived’ going into Slytherin? That’s not a low profile at all.”

“What better way to shed a mythology that I didn’t earn?”

Clark raised an eyebrow at that. “Here I thought you were going to milk it for all it was worth. With all that talk about being a savior—”

“If anyone calls me a savior, it’ll be because I earned it,” Harry said, smirking. “Me. Not fate or mum.”

Clark rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you will.”

They made their way past packed compartment after packed compartment until they found a compartment with only a redheaded boy in it, gazing gloomily out the window.

“How about this one?” Clark said.

“That looks like a Weasley,” Harry said. “A big family. Lost a lot in the last war. Good people — Uncle Sirius thinks that Arthur Weasley is one of the few people in the Ministry who can’t be bribed.”

“You know, it’s a little creepy that you asked Uncle Sirius for full briefings on all of the families who had students in our year,” Clark said. He knocked on the compartment door and slid it open. “Hey, can we sit here?”

The boy looked at them. “Uh, sure. I’m Ron Weasley.”

“Clark Potter,” Clark said. “This is my brother.”

Harry raised a hand and waved. He didn’t feel like revealing his identity. If nothing else, it would be funny to see Ronald Weasley do something stupid.

“Oh, cool,” Ron said. “Are you muggle-raised?”

“My ma and pa were wizards,” Clark said warily. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I’m not—I’m not against muggle-raised people or anything, sorry if I came across that way,” Ron said, flushing. “But there’s just another—there’s a famous boy named Harry Potter who’s supposed to be in our year, and if my last name were Potter I would clarify with ‘no relation’, though I guess I have the opposite problem, there are so many Weasleys that people just assume I’m related to all of them. So I would be clarifying with no relation, just so people weren’t confused or to make things less awkward.”

Harry was starting to feel bad for this boy. He was tripping over himself to make things less awkward. It would be funny if he were an arsehole with an inferiority complex, but he seemed so effacing it was kind of pathetic. Clark seemed bemused and was doubtless about to offer reassurance, but Harry thought of something funnier.

He pulled off his hat and lightened his glasses. “Harry Potter. I’m Clark’s twin brother. Nice to meet you, Ron.”

Ron’s mouth dropped open. He looked between the two of them for a good minute, utterly bewildered. Then his brow furrowed.

“You don’t look identical,” he said. Then he seemed to realize how dumb that sounded. “Not that all twins are identical. But you don’t have a scar.”

“Well, of course not,” Harry said. “The Killing Curse doesn’t leave scars.”

As far as Harry could tell, that was the prevailing narrative. As a baby, he had somehow repelled the Killing Curse, which had left him with a lightning-bolt scar. Somehow. Even though no one had witnessed the events.

He suspected Dumbledore had spread the rumors for some reason. And because people didn’t want to think too hard about it, even though it was ridiculous, they bought it.

“But everyone says—” Ron said. Then he stopped himself. “How—what—none of this makes sense!”

“I feel you, mate,” Clark said. “Harry and I just learned that magic was real a month ago!”

It was uncanny, really, how Clark could lie and use their story of a double-life to make other people around him feel better. Harry was rather glad Clark was there. As funny as it was to watch Ron’s brain short-circuit, it was better not to alienate the Weasleys as potential allies.

There was a knock on the door. It was the Treat Trolley. “Will you have enough for the rest of the train if we buy the lot?” Harry asked.

The trolley witch gave him a look. “Certainly. I am the Trolley Witch, after all.”

“Then we’ll buy the lot,” Harry said. Sirius’s description of the Weasleys had given the impression that they skimped on luxuries. Such a display of generosity would doubtlessly endear Ron to Harry’s cause, if it became necessary in the future. He was rewarded with the sight of Ron pigging out on the various sweets he’d bought.

“Say, why’d you ask her if there’d be enough for the rest of the train?” Clark asked quietly.

“We wouldn’t want anyone’s first impression of the Boy-Who-Lived to be an arse who took all the sweets for himself, would we?” Harry muttered.

“Are you really the Boy-Who-Lived, though?” Ron said. “If you don’t have the scar…”

“Well, the Killing Curse doesn’t leave scars,” Harry said.

“Right, but the story that says you have the scar is the same one that says you survived the Killing Curse. But it also doesn’t mention that you have a twin.”

“Oh, I like you already,” Harry said. This Weasley didn’t seem as credulous as the general populace. “You have no appetite for bullshit.”

“So it is bullshit?”

“I don’t keep track of all the rumors about myself, but probably,” Harry said.

Clark nodded sagely. “We were raised in the muggle world, after all.”

Ron looked between them. “I think I’m getting a stomachache.”

“You sure ate those sweets real quick,” Clark said.

“That’s not it. My twin brothers Fred and George prank me all the time, and it’s just my luck that the first people I meet on the train are you two… It’s just obvious that you’re both hiding something. Other than the fact that, uh, you exist, Clark.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Clark said. “We’re not hiding things just from you. It was for everyone’s protection. If everyone knew the truth about me and Harry… well, You-Know-Who’s followers… who knows what they could’ve done. Who they would’ve hurt. How they could’ve twisted things. It was for the wizarding world’s protection.”

Ron nodded. “Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

Harry let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Once again, Clark had salvaged the situation.

Their compartment door slid open, without a hint of a knock.

“Has anyone seen a toad? Neville’s lost one,” said a girl with bushy hair and prominent teeth. There was a meek boy besides her. Harry surmised that the boy must’ve been Neville Longbottom, whose parents had been tortured into insanity by Sirius’s cousin Bellatrix Lestrange. This, according to Sirius, had been incredibly tragic, as Alice and Frank Longbottom had been good people and fierce warriors. Thus, Neville was not worth making an enemy of. Even if he looked rather pathetic at the present moment. But then again, he was eleven, and Harry was pretty sure that all eleven year olds looked somewhat pathetic, himself included.

“Sorry, no,” Harry said. It would be incredibly foolish to dismiss them immediately. “Would you like some sweets?”

The girl shook her head. “I’m afraid I mustn’t, my parents are dentists and they would have my hide. Hermione Granger, by the way.”

There were no old families named Granger, so Harry surmised that she must be a muggleborn. He wasn’t going to mention it, of course, because as Ron had demonstrated, bringing up blood status was a great way to put your foot in your mouth and alienate potential allies.

“Suit yourself. Would you like a sweet, Neville?” Harry said.

Neville shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just so nervous about Trevor.”

“Trevor’s your frog?” Clark said.

“Toad, actually,” Neville said. “He was a gift from my gran, and I’ve already lost him…”

“You could ask the prefects for help?” Ron said.

“That’s a good idea,” Hermione said. “Why didn’t we—”

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Harry said. “Accio Trevor the toad.”

Ron looked at him. “I’m not sure—”

A toad zipped down the corridor and ended up in Harry’s hands. “Is this him?”

“It is! Thank you so much!” Neville said.

“Would you like to join us?” Clark said. “We have more sweets than we can eat ourselves.”

A few quick moments later, and they had made room for Hermione and Neville. Neville had started eating sweets, and Trevor was playing with some chocolate frogs, and Hermione was cautiously tasting a meat pastry.

“I realize I never got your names,” Hermione said. “You look our age, but that was a summoning charm. That’s a fourth year spell, isn’t it? Does Hogwarts have an advanced track for gifted students?”

“Sorry, I’m just gifted,” Harry said. Clark kicked him. “Uh, I mean, I had access to some of my mum’s notebooks, and she wrote down many tips and tricks for how to do magic in nonobvious ways. Harry Potter, by the way. This is my brother, Clark.”

He said this with nonchalance, and got the exact dumbfounded reaction he was hoping for.

“What? What?” Hermione said, her voice getting shrill. “None of the books mention that you have a brother! You’re in Modern Magical History and the Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century! None of them mention your brother! And—and—”

“Why don’t you have a scar?” Neville said.

Harry smirked. “Killing Curse doesn’t leave marks. Really says a lot about the state of wizarding journalism and historiography, doesn’t it?”

Ron nodded sagely. “My mum and dad say that if you want the real truth, you should read the Quibbler. I didn’t believe them until… well…”

He pointed between Harry and Clark.

“I just… thought books could be trusted,” Hermione said. “I thought adults… Adults are supposed to have answers.”

“If they did,” Harry said, “why do they fight each other all the time?”

“They’re just trying their best, like all of us,” Clark said, interceding once again. “They don’t have all the answers, so they just try what they can. And a lot of the time it’s not enough, but I can’t fault them as long as they keep trying.”

Harry watched with some relief as the tension in the room defused. He had pushed a little too far, once again, and luckily enough Clark had been there to pull him back from the edge.

He glanced into the train corridor. It seemed that people were passing by them rather frequently, glancing into the window.

“People seem awfully interested in our compartment,” Harry said nonchalantly.

“They probably think they recognize you,” Ron said. “There are a lot of artist’s renditions of you. Children’s books of your adventures.”

Harry made a mental note to check that James was licensing his image properly and harvesting royalties for his likeness. He was vaguely aware of the existence of such books but had never read them, since they were probably tripe meant for children. But James had spent the past decade as a shadowy baron of industry, so it was quite likely everything was in order.

“So, what Houses do you think you’ll all be getting into?” Hermione said, trying to change the subject. “I’m hoping I get into Gryffindor. I want to be a hero.”

“My whole family’s been in Gryffindor,” said Ron, gloomily. “They’re all doing quite well for themselves. I hope I’m as successful as they are.”

“Mine too,” Neville said. “In Gryffindor, I mean. But I’m afraid I’ll end up in Hufflepuff.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Clark said gently. “I mean, all the books say that Hufflepuff is full of kind people who are diligent and loyal, the kinds of people who lift their friends up. You don’t have to go it alone.”

Neville didn’t look much cheerier at that. “But I want to be a Gryffindor,” he said. “I want… I want to be a hero, too.”

“Well, I’m sure if you ask nicely, they’ll let you go to Gryffindor anyways,” Harry said, trying to avoid sounding sarcastic. “God forbid you have to wear yellow instead of red. God forbid you do a bunch of good through a lifetime of service instead of in a few flashy events.”

“What about you, Harry, Clark?” Hermione said. “I mean, Harry, you’re the Boy-Who-Lived, so surely you’re going to Gryffindor?”

“Me? Maybe,” Harry said. “But Clark’s much better at the saving-people thing than I am. I think I’d be happier in Ravenclaw, the house for the clever.”

For once, Clark didn’t interfere. And in truth, Harry wasn’t sure he would fit all that well into Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw was for people spent their lives buried in books, never leaving their world of trying to be too clever for their own good.

“Wow, really?” Hermione said.

“You know the books didn’t even mention me,” Clark said. “I think Gryffindor would be just grand. But Harry… he’s much more clever than I am. But still, he’s my brother.”

“Thank you for stating the obvious,” Harry said.

“You know what I mean,” Clark said. “You escaped from our… uh, muggle guardians by reading a lot, and I escaped by spending time outside.”

But Harry knew that James and Clark both had suspicions about where he would end up. They knew he was clever, but he hadn’t ever kept his ruthlessness and his desire for greatness from his family. Harry simply knew he was destined for something grander than Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Gryffindor.

He was destined for Slytherin. The house for those who had grand ambitions. The house for those who sought to reach far past their station. The house of the cunning and the cruel. The house of those who tried to reshape society in their images. The house of Dark Lords.

The house of Voldemort, and the elite Death Eaters.

The compartment door slid open again, yet again without any knocking.

The aristocratic blond young man who slid opened the door had an arrogant smirk on his face. He was flanked by two very large other boys.

“Is it true?” he said, “They’re saying all up and down the train that Harry Potter might be in this compartment.”

Harry immediately pegged the boy as Draco Malfoy. Sirius had many things to say about the Malfoys, and none of them were good. They were unpredictable. They were bizarre. Narcissa Malfoy nee Black was supposedly dead, yet someone resembling her was often seen departing the scenes of vigilante justice. Lucius Malfoy had been a Death Eater in the last war, but claimed he had only acted under duress, which was a ridiculous lie. The Malfoys were probably not good people, and though it was possible Draco Malfoy could be an ally, resource, or informant, that depended entirely on his sense of civility and humor.

“What,” said Harry, “is truth? The truth for one person so rarely is the truth of all people. There is no one truth. There is no one justice. There’s just us, and the endless struggle towards being a better man.”

Draco sneered. “Just answer the question, peasant. Is Harry Potter in this compartment or not?”

It was obvious that Draco Malfoy sucked.

Clark and Ron made to get up, Neville belatedly also staggering to his feet, but Harry motioned them down.

“That depends on who you are,” Harry said.

The boy drew himself up pathetically. “I am Draco, of the Most Noble House of Malfoy, Scion of the Moste Ancient and Noble House of Black,” he said with a flamboyant flair.

“Well, Mister Malfoy,” said Harry, “you are behaving most unbecoming for an heir of the House of Malfoy. Such rudeness cannot go unpunished. Why, when my father hears about this, he will have words with yours.”

“And just who do you think you are?” said Malfoy mockingly.

“I am Harry, of the Most Noble House of Potter, beloved godson of the Moste Ancient and Noble House of Black,” he said in a mocking tone as falsely noble as Draco’s.

Draco stared at him dumbly. “No you aren’t,” he said after a minute. “You don’t have the scar.”

“That’s what I said,” grumbled Ron.

“Obviously not,” said Harry. “The Killing Curse doesn’t leave marks. Does anyone in this society actually understand magic? Any purebloods at all? Anyone? Or was being raised by muggles worth it after all?”

“Well, irregardsless,” said Malfoy after a moment, haughtily trying to regain the upper hand, “Are you going to go crying to your dead daddy about my insults to your house, Potter? How? Necromancy? No magic can bring back the dead.”

Malfoy smirked, satisfied that his little truism would cause Harry to start sobbing or something. But Harry just smiled. Malfoy visibly grew nervouser, but Harry just smiled. After 30 straight seconds of Harry smiling, Malfoy turned pale and ran away, a trail of urine behind him.

Harry turned back to the compartment, his face relaxing into a genuine smile, not a rictus grin, to see that Ron had also gone pale.

“Blimey, please don’t do that, Harry,” Ron said in a shaky voice. “For a moment there we thought the Laughing Man had got you.”

Harry winced. He was doing a terrible job of endearing himself to these possible future allies.

“Who’s the Laughing Man?” said Hermione.

“Oh, no one told you?” said Ron. “The Laughing Man is like… the bogeyman. Is that a thing for Muggles? He’s a person who commits crimes random for no reason at all.”

“What sort of crimes?” said Hermione, frowning.

“That’s just the thing,” said Clark. “He’s very inconsistent. When we were about five, he killed people at random. Blood status, wealth, politics… none of that seemed to matter to him. There are still a lot of disappearances from around that time that just don’t make sense, and if we attribute them all to the Laughing Man they make even less sense.”

Harry gave Clark a meaningful look. That sort of talk made it very obvious that they hadn’t been raised by muggles and the more he tried it… But Clark shrugged. Harry supposed it was a fair point. At any rate, they’d already told Ron, Hermione, and Neville that the whole Boy-Who-Lived legend was a cover story.

“He used me like some sort of bouncy ball when his uncle dropped him out of the window,” said Neville. “Bounced me up and down the neighborhood, singing some tune about plants.”

“If that were the case, how are you not dead?” Hermione asked. Neville shrugged.

“Maybe I am. Maybe I’m just a bunch of plants that thinks they’re Neville Longbottom. How weird would that be?”

“And there was that time he stole Draco Malfoy’s toy broom in Diagon Alley,” said Harry, choosing to ignore that non-sequitur, “and Draco broke down screaming and sobbing and claiming that his father would never believe him when he heard about it.”

He winced. There went the cover story. He immediately thought of plausible lies.

“…Surely that can’t all be true,” said Hermione.

“You’d think so,” said Harry. “But he’s got other names. The Rat King, the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker.”

“Hey, wait,” said Ron. “You two were supposed to be in hiding with Muggles. Was that also part of the cover story? How’d you explain hearing about Draco Malfoy and his toy broom?”

Harry chose the best plausible lie. “I saw a back issue of the Prophet. Of course when something mildly inconvenient happens to a Malfoy, it makes the front page. So I read up on their family and that’s how I knew what to do to the little git.”

Ron smiled cruelly, while Hermione looked thoughtful.

“So it was like witness protection,” Hermione said. “And the whole Boy-Who-Lived story…”

“Not a hoax, not a dream,” Clark said. “Just an imaginary story.”

He gave Harry a wink and held it for just a bit too long.

“Mate, is your eye alright?” said Ron.


	5. Sorting

Soon enough they had entered the castle, and were awaiting their sortings. The process was fairly simple. A very traditionally dressed witch, Minerva McGonagall, put a hat on their heads, and it announced what Hogwarts house they would spend the next seven years in.

Harry had a fairly good idea of how this was all going to go. He had squeezed Sirius for information in a way that his godfather had found almost off-putting, but the end result was that Harry knew exactly where every pureblood and halfblood child would get sorted. The only surprises would be muggleborns, and truth be told the only surprises with them would be Slytherin sortings.

There were scant few surprises. Tracey Davis, a half-blood was sorted into Slytherin, but there were few other unexpected sortings. Granger and Longbottom ended up in Gryffindor, and Malfoy and his goons ended up in Slytherin.

When Clark was called, the Great Hall burst into confused murmurs. The wizarding world was befuddled at the existence of a second Potter. Harry took the time to look upon the Head Table. The teachers seemed to be mildly surprised with a few exceptions.

A man with unkempt hair and a hooked nose was glaring at Clark with rage. Harry recognized him as Severus Snape, head of Slytherin House.

Snape was probably going to be a problem.

And of course, there was Albus Dumbledore, sitting passively on his chair, which had weird glowing lines on it. Weird glowing lines showed up on any chair Dumbledore used a lot, from what Harry could remember of the man’s visits to their home. He caught Dumbledore’s eye, and the old wizard gave him a nod.

“GRYFFINDOR!” the hat shouted. The hall burst into polite clapping, mostly from the Gryffindor table, but most people didn’t see the significance.

Harry was certain that would soon change.

He sat on the sorting stool.

McGonagall put the hat on his head.

“Ah, the natural-born Potter,” the hat said.

As opposed to what? Harry thought.

“The space-borne Potter,” the hat said. “I would’ve thought that was obvious.”

So you could see through whatever barrier Clark has against Legilimency, Harry thought. Interesting.

“I can’t, as a rule, disclose anything about the sorting process for other students,” the hat said.

As if I needed you to, Harry thought. Clark’s a Gryffindor, through and through.

“You’ve got well-informed opinions for someone who was supposedly raised in exile from the wizarding world by muggle relatives,” the hat said dryly.

I assume you know that’s an obvious lie, Harry thought. How long do you think it will last?

“I’m a hat, not an oracle,” the hat said. “You know better than me.”

Harry didn’t know for sure, but he had a very good idea for how long he could maintain this fiction: not at all. The Muggleborns would see right through their ignorance of the muggle world. That wouldn’t be so much of a problem for him, but Clark was in Gryffindor, a house that accepted plenty of Muggleborns. They hadn’t coordinated backstories, beyond ‘raised in exile by muggle relatives’. It would probably be easiest to say that they had been homeschooled, and raised on a farm. The first half of that was true. The second was far enough from the truth.

“You already knew where you were going,” the hat said. “All these plots and plans…”

Yes, Ravenclaw, Harry thought.

“Absolute bull,” the hat said. “There are muggleborns are Ravenclaw, and you assumed you weren’t going to have to deal with any. SLYTHERIN!”

The Great Hall was silent.

Then, there were murmurs. And these were of shock. Confusion. Disgust. And no clapping.

Harry stood up as McGonagall pulled the hat from his head. Her hands were shaking. He took a deep breath, and put on a big smile.

He gave a jaunty wave to Severus Snape, who looked absolutely livid, and nodded to Dumbledore, who nodded back. Then, he made his way over to the Slytherin table and sat in silence while the other Slytherins gave him dubious looks.

He saw, out of the corner of his eye, a few older boys and girls—probably Slytherin prefects—muttering to Draco Malfoy and glancing in his general direction. It was obvious to Harry that the Malfoy name still carried weight with the current generations of older students, and they were assigning Draco Malfoy as his minder of sorts. That had the potential to be a problem, if he didn’t subvert Malfoy’s dominance early. But who did they think they were? Did they think they could establish a social hierarchy by fiat, instead of letting it settle naturally based on who was the best fit as a natural leader? The very thought was idiotic.

The sorting finished, with Blaise Zabini joining Harry at the Slytherin table. Blaise was a dark-skinned boy, and he gave Harry a raised eyebrow. Harry reviewed his mental knowledge of the Zabinis. Blaise’s mother had about seven husbands, many of whom had died under mysterious circumstances, which implied that Blaise would be very wealthy one day.

The other students sorted into Slytherin, that Sirius had given Harry intel on, were Daphne Greengrass, Theo Nott, Tracey Davis, Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy Parkinson.

* * *

Dinner started. Harry ate just enough, and then got up and started walking towards the Gryffindor table.

He was intercepted by two redheads - the Weasley twins, Fred and George.

“Well, well, well,” one of them said. “If it isn’t the boy who lived.”

“Or is it just a Slytherin?” said the other.

“Hard to tell,” said the first. “Our ickle brother Ronniekins is saying some awfully odd things about the boy-who-lived anyways…”

“Look, I just want to talk to my brother,” Harry said. These two might become a problem. “Is that so wrong?”

“So it’s not a coincidence,” said a twin. “I thought the name Potter would be…”

“Unless he’s lying,” said the other twin. “Unless he’s a Slytherin going to bully an unsuspecting muggleborn for sharing the same name as him…”

“Are my brothers giving you trouble?” said a voice from behind the twins. It was Ron. He was standing with Clark.

“Ron,” Harry said. “No, your brothers are simply defending your honor, as all good brothers do.”

Ron snorted. “Fat chance. Any reason you came over here?”

“Clark,” Harry said. “Can we talk? Alone?”

“Yeah, sure,” Clark said.

They went to a far corner of the Great Hall. Harry was pretty sure the eyes of half the school were on them, but he didn’t care.

“Look, Harry, I just want to say, even though you’re in Slytherin, you’re still my—”

Harry pulled out his wand. “Muffliato,” he said.

“What was that?”

“Anti-Eavesdropping spell,” Harry said. “It was in mum’s notes. And yes, Clark. I know I’m still your brother. I heard you on the train, and I heard dad when we were packing. I’m well aware that nothing short of murder would cause you to stop caring for me.”

“Oh,” Clark said. “Then what did you want to talk about?”

“Our cover story.”

Clark sighed. “If you really wanted the cover to work, you could have pretended that… it was just a coincidence. That I’m just named Potter and that we’re not related.”

“That would last all of a week. Then I’d start to suspect that your slacking in class would make me look bad. At least, make the name of Potter look bad. And besides, your friends in Gryffindor already know. Do you really expect Ronald Weasley to be able to keep a secret from those twins for a whole year? If I had to deal with them I’d go mad.”

Clark frowned. “The basic cover story — raised by muggle relatives…”

“Homeschooled,” Harry said.

“That part’s true, though.”

“On a farm, somewhere with poor communications.”

“Why a farm?” Clark said.

“Looks more naive,” Harry said. “More innocent. Helps the legend look better.”

“Would it benefit you,” Clark said after a moment, “If we pretended that we had a falling-out over this?”

“Not yet,” Harry said.

“Right, the cover story,” Clark said. “Be a bit odd if two muggle-raised farmboys suddenly just knew that Gryffindors hated Slytherins.”

Harry snorted. “It’s a school house. Why on earth does it have so much importance?”

Unspoken between them was the very real fear that this arbitrary division would one day truly drive them apart.

After dinner, Harry went to the Slytherin common room, which was in the dungeons, under the Black Lake. Green light filtered in through the ceiling, casting the room in an unearthly glow. All the older students were clustered with their friends, catching up on the events of the summer.

And Draco Malfoy was trying to hold court. He sat on one couch, Pansy Parkinson at his side, Crabbe and Goyle standing behind them. (Draco Malfoy had a fascistic blond hair and blue eyes.)

Scattered on the chairs near that couch were Daphne Greengrass, Tracey Davis, Theo Nott, Blaise Zabini, and of course Harry himself.

“I think it should be obvious,” Draco said, “that there is a natural order to our year. On my side, there are the noble families of Malfoy, Parkinson, Crabbe, and Goyle, while the rest of you disorganized rabble are a half-blood, a probably bastard, a Nott, a reinstated squib, and the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’.”

“I quite agree,” Harry said. “The half-bloods, squibs, and the Boy-Who-Lived won the last war, while the Malfoys make public appearances once a year to talk about how sad it is that Narcissa is dead.”

It was a very low blow, but Harry’s mum was dead too. He quickly ran through his notes. The half-blood was Davis, the probably bastard was Zabini, the Nott was obviously Nott, the boy-who-lived was himself, supposedly, which left Greengrass as the supposed reinstated squib. He would have to look into that more deeply.

His last statement clearly had made Draco mad. “One day, Potter, you’ll know your rightful place. Anyone else want to say something impertinent before I show you what happens when you besmirch the name of Malfoy?”

“Let me save you the trouble,” Harry said. “When you besmirch the name of Malfoy Draco goes crying to his daddy and then the honorable Lucius Malfoy throws his weight around to make schoolchildren be nice to his son. It’s very Slytherin of him.”

“You’re garbage, Potter,” said Pansy Parkinson. “Talking about Draco’s family like that? His father is in mourning.”

“The way I see it,” Harry said, “Your father is in debt to me, so he should be very careful with what you say next.”

“Why on earth would you believe something so ridiculous?” Draco said, flabbergasted.

“I read the newspapers. I looked at the rumors. I learned everything once I realized I was a war hero,” Harry said, as he meticulously improvised lines that would fit within the lie he was going to live for the next seven years. “And do you know what I found about Lucius Malfoy? A joyous declaration that the Boy-Who-Lived’s defeat of the Dark Lord had freed him from the horrors of the Imperius Curse.”

“Potter, you are a piece of—” said Parkinson. But Draco held up a hand to stop her.

“You’re completely correct, Potter,” he said. “You’re a war hero. I see that now. You’re responsible for freeing wizarding Britain from the clutches of one of the most powerful wizards to ever grace our land. The two of us… we’re a cut above all the rest. We’re divinely endowed. I was wrong to antagonize you. You are more than deserving of a place by my side as future leaders of wizarding Britain.”

Harry was amazed. Draco was capable of actions beyond buffoonery, after all. Harry’s opinion of Draco had been soured by their meeting on the train, but clearly other factors — Weasley’s presence, and Harry’s invocation of imagery of the Laughing Man — had been enough to unsettle Draco beyond the grasp of composure.

The offer was a tempting one. Draco Malfoy could be a very powerful ally, if he could be deconverted from the ideology that had led Lucius Malfoy to serve Voldemort in earnest or at least be fraternizing with Voldemort’s supporters enough to get hit by an Imperius Curse. But on the other hand, that would mean having to put up with Draco Malfoy’s ego for the foreseeable future…

Nobody else was speaking. They seemed to be frozen, as if wondering if he would accept the offer. If there would be a Potter-Malfoy reign of terror over Slytherin for the next seven years.

Then someone snorted.

Harry broke out of his reverie — was he really imagining sharing power with Draco Malfoy? — and saw that Daphne Greengrass was rolling her eyes. Her eyes were inhumanly blue, and her hair was so blonde it was almost white, as opposed to Draco’s hair, which was a perfectly normal blond for a human being.

Harry didn’t know much about Daphne Greengrass, or the Greengrasses in general. Sirius’s briefing had skimped on them, mentioning only that they had recently retrieved a squib daughter from exile in France. Shipping away magicless children was a common practice among more traditional pureblood families to avoid embarrassment, but the Greengrasses had never rated as that kind of family, even going so far as to be relatively neutral in the last war, focusing on infrastructural services. Furthermore, after the war had ended, “sent away as a squib” had outright become a euphemism for describing children killed by the Laughing Man. The Joker. A serial killer with random crimes, yet who seemed to take a certain joy in murdering pureblood children.

Draco rose from his couch and stalked over to Daphne Greengrass’s chair, looming over her. “Look, Miss Greengrass,” he said, trying to sound menacing, “I don’t know what they taught you in… whatever muggle shithole you grew up in, but here in Britain the name of Malfoy means something. Either we can be friends, or you can be my enemy.”

“Has that line ever worked before?” Daphne said. She had an interesting accent. But Harry, having grown up going on covert journeys throughout Europe, instantly realized that it was not French.

Draco didn’t say anything, but he glanced back at Pansy, Crabbe, and Goyle. Then he glared at Daphne.

“Potter I can tolerate,” he said, his voice rising, “but I don’t know why some reinstated squib thinks she can mouth off to me—”

Harry barely caught what happened next. One moment, Draco was raising a fist at Daphne. The next, there was a sound of rushing air and a thump. Faster than the eye could see, Draco had flown backwards, his robes trailing through the air, and he smashed into the opposite wall and slid down into a crumpled heap.

Harry wondered if he was dead. Then Draco moaned pathetically. Crabbe and Goyle immediately went to tend to him, while Pansy sat up a little straighter.

“I think,” Harry said, looking Daphne in the eye. Something gave him pause, made him lose his place. Something about how she looked was oddly familiar in a way he could not identify. Something about her face seemed trustworthy.

“I think, Miss Greengrass,” he said, “that as much as I may disagree with Draco Malfoy on some matters, he does have a point in that it would be best if we were all at least civil with each other. And if we cannot be friends, at the very least I would not have you as an enemy.”

She looked at him, with eyes that struck Harry as inhumanly blue (as opposed to, say, Draco’s humanly blue eyes). Then, after a second, she nodded.

* * *

_The Blunt and Arcane Trauma Shield Suit Charm (BATSsuit Charm)_

_From the Journals of Lily Evans (Potter)_

_Specifications: The Blunt and Arcane Trauma Shield Suit Charm is intended to be full-body protection against most low level spells, as opposed to most forms of physical attack. A wielder of a BATSsuit charm should be able to survive a fifty-foot drop with no repercussions. The spell is also designed to be low-power enough to sustain itself off of ambient magic and solar energy for sustained periods of time, allowing a cast at the end of a summer to persist until the first day of Hogwarts term._

_Although labeled a blunt trauma shield, the spell should be equally protective against piercing trauma — for example, from both an intact and a shattered beer bottle. The spell should also not fully nullify incoming force, but weaken it to a harmless pressure to allow the user to feign weakness._

_Experimental notes:_

_Jan 12: Charm lacks full coverage, only extends slightly from point of casting_

_Feb 24: Charm lacks flexibility, locks limbs in place_

_Mar 15: Charm breaks after one punch, from me._

_Mar 16: Charm does not break after one punch from Severus_

_Mar 17: Charm still breaks from one punch from me. Encouraged Severus to try harder._

_Mar 18: We have decided that I will be testing the resistance of the BATSsuit to punches for now._

_Mar 15: Limited physical durability attained. Started testing with Oppungo with blunt objects. Seems durable enough._

_May 1: Blocks minor jinxes and hexes — dissipates magic into air. Testing stunners._

_May 20: Success! Now to test durability…_

_Jun 1: Charm has held for almost two weeks without recasting/maintenance. We’re going back to a muggle area now, so it can’t be helped._

_Jul 13: Charm broke prematurely. Severus cut on face. Should not be permanent damage._


	6. Potions

The next time Harry had a chance to talk to Clark, it was after breakfast on the day of their first Potions class. They had found a secluded classroom not too far away from Potions.

“So,” Harry said. “How are you settling in?”

“Well enough,” Clark said. “My friends are pretty great. I’ve been talking a bit with Neville Longbottom. There’s also a nice lad named Dean Thomas who’s into art.”

“Muggleborn?” Harry asked. He already knew the answer, of course.

“Well, yeah,” Clark said. “What about your friends?”

“Draco Malfoy tried to establish dominance and failed,” Harry said. “But…”

Clark rolled his eyes. “Slytherin stuff?”

“We’re not baby politicians in Slytherin. It’s just…”

Harry wasn’t sure how to describe the sight of Draco Malfoy getting thrown into a wall. If it had happened in any other house, the rumor would have spread through the school like wildfire, but Slytherin clearly preferred to avoid public humiliation of their own.

“We’ll see what happens,” Harry said. “Have you reviewed the textbooks up to about fifth year?”

“Haven’t needed to,” Clark said. “Not since the first time. Do you really think Snape will try to pull something?”

“From what dad and Sirius said? He definitely will.”

Harry was personally very jealous of Clark’s memory abilities. Clark didn’t really need to study his textbooks, because he could just remember what they said. He had an eidetic memory. Harry, in contrast, had to rely on memory methods Lily had written in her notebooks. Lily had been a pioneer in many magical methods, one of which was the Hypertime Memory Palace. A mundane memory palace technique was a way of encoding facts and knowledge into visual and spatial memory, by associating the desired memory with vivid imagery. For example, the instructions to brew a specific potion could be remembered as a hike, on which one would meet the creatures and see the plants that produced the raw potion ingredients.

A Hypertime Memory Palace differed slightly. While the base technique was the same, Lily’s innovations had suggested creating an actual physical representation of the desirable memories in wizardspace, and then using dark and arcane magics to cast that physical representation into another mystical dimension, and somehow connecting that dimension directly to the brain. By doing this, Lily had theorized, it would be possible to preserve one’s memories outside of the universe, in case some event happened to alter the flow of time.

Harry wasn’t sure if that would ever happen, but he had resolved to figure out how to implement the Hypertime Memory Palace as soon as possible.

He didn’t have Clark’s photographic memory, after all.

“So tell me,” Clark said. “Is Slytherin as bad as dad feared it would be?”

“What do you mean?” Harry said. “What, brave men in Slytherin and traitors in Gryffindor?”

“Just… the blood purism.”

“Well, you know how it is. The Malfoys and their cronies would’ve been the old guard of that all. But Lucius became a recluse once Narcissa passed. And with what happened to Draco…”

“What happened with Draco?”

“I’ve got to have some secrets,” Harry said.

“What about Nott, Greengrass, and Zabini?”

“Nott’s brother is in exile as a squib, the Zabinis don’t commit, and Greengrass is a ‘reinstated squib’, but the only reason families admit that they have a squib child is because the alternative is admitting that their kid was killed by the Laughing Man. She’s back from the dead, just like you or me. None of them are staunchly blood purists. But don’t you have a perfect memory? Shouldn’t you already know this?”

Clark chuckled. “Just wanted to hear it from you. Wanted to be sure that you’re still in love with showing off how smart you are.”

Harry punched him in the arm. Clark didn’t flinch in the slightest.

“You absolute arse.”

* * *

Potions was a joint class with both Gryffindors and Slytherins. Harry thought this was a bad idea, since traditionally the houses had a rivalry, and they were playing around with possibly extremely explosive material.

The Gryffindors all sat on one side of the room, while the Slytherins all sat on the other.

As expected, Snape asked both Harry and Clark obnoxious questions from far beyond the first-year curriculum. Disappointingly, he only got to third-year level questions before giving up and deciding that the two of them would not be cowed. Then the class moved onto the practical component.

Harry caught Clark’s eye, and they both decided that they would work with other people to keep their situation ambiguous. Clark ended up working with Neville Longbottom.

Harry could see Draco Malfoy angling to work with him, so he quickly paired himself up with the nearest possible person, who turned out to be Daphne Greengrass.

“Harry,” she said, in formal tones. This was odd, since Slytherins tended to use last names unless they were actual friends. Her accent, of course, continued to not be French.

“Greengrass,” he replied coolly. He noticed her face tense for just a second, before she gave a slight nod.

“Potter,” she said. “That strikes me as inconvenient. There are two of you.”

“A rarity, I know,” he said. This was actually true, since the Laughing Man liked to target pureblood families with multiple children. Top-Secret forensics (that Sirius had given to Harry, expecting that he would forget them) suggested that he thought this was because single-children or orphans were either more tragic or funnier or possibly both at different times.

“Is it?” she said. “I have a sister myself. I suppose it would be inconvenient if you referred to both of us as Greengrass.”

“You can call me Harry if I can call you Daphne,” Harry said. She nodded.

They set to work on the potion, following instructions Snape had written on the board. Harry recognized the instructions as a fairly standard display potion — a potion that was meant to demonstrate the magical effects of ingredients, as well as provide an assessment of the brewer’s skill. He had never brewed such a potion before, as that was illegal, but he was more than familiar with the theory behind the choices. His mother’s notes had included an extensive section on potions, after all — though most of her potions work had been done in collaboration with Severus Snape.

It quickly became obvious to Harry that Daphne had no intuition for the magic behind potion making, though her handling of the ingredients was incredibly precise.

“This is odd,” she said, glancing between the ingredients and Snape’s instructions, as she stirred her cauldron, in which bubbled a green liquid. “One would expect the reaction of the ingredients to turn… to remain green, not turn purple.”

“Is that so?” Harry asked. He glanced at his own cauldron. The liquid within was bubbling a faint lilac.

“The copper content, and the water and acid… I am unread on the theory,” she said.

Harry turned what she’d said in his head. It was basic chemistry, which he had some grasp of, but he was well aware that most people in the muggle world didn’t study chemistry until high school. Daphne Greengrass was advanced in the sciences, more so than a squib-in-exile often would be.

“The purple is a result result from channeling magic into the potion,” he said.

“Really,” she said, somewhat skeptically. “This is all new to me, of course. Being reinstated from exile as a squib is… I am told it is incredibly rare. The first determination is often jarringly final.”

Harry nodded. “The theory I’ve read suggests that most wizards and witches shed magic so naturally that the mere act of stirring a potion is enough to make the change happen.”

Though this wasn’t universal, of course. Other people were having trouble, their potions remaining green: Neville, Crabbe, and surprisingly, Clark.

He watched Daphne very carefully. There was something undeniably interesting about her, if for no other reason than being able to throw Draco Malfoy across the Slytherin common room. Hogwarts robes were fairly good at concealing musculature, of course, but even so she didn’t seem to have that sort of brute strength… and yet, she did, yet wasn’t tripping over her hands or casually breaking things, suggested a huge degree of control.

She nodded, and gave her potion one clockwise stir. It instantly turned a deep imperial purple. Then, it started popping violently, bubbling and gurgling, frothing above the cauldron lip. Harry saw the signs of impending disaster.

He pulled out his wand and cast a Containment Charm around Daphne’s cauldron just as it exploded. He had the strangest sense of deja vu.

Snape descended upon them. “Idiot girl,” he scowled. “I suppose you thought more stirs would make the pretty color prettier? Still, I suppose you, Potter, are not as completely worthless as most celebrities.”

“Well, sir, I have my mother’s eyes,” Harry said completely innocently.

Snape scowled at him. “Clean this mess up. Split your potion with Miss Greengrass. Perhaps you might both scavenge a passing teamwork grade.”

“You have your mother’s eyes?” Daphne said. “What, why did… is that supposed to mean something?”

“To him, I expected it might,” Harry said. “But he’s awfully good at hiding what he really thinks about us, don’t you think?”

Daphne snorted. “I’ve had some very tough tutors in the past. Many of them really did hate me as much as they acted like.”

“Over in France,” Harry said. It was transparent fishing for information, but he wasn’t sure how else to approach it.

“Yes. France.”

She didn’t take the bait.

“I wasn’t aware that they taught such advanced chemistry in primary school in France,” Harry said casually.

Daphne shrugged. “Tutors.”

They made it through the potions lesson more or less intact. Harry had discreetly observed Clark, and noted that he had managed to get his potion purple and finished as well. Snape begrudgingly gave them all passing grades.

“Tell me, Harry,” Daphne said, as they were cleaning up, “how well-read are you in magical theory?”

“I’m no scholar,” Harry said. “But I’ve read a lot for someone our age.”

He didn’t mention, of course, that much of his knowledge was unorthodox; his mother, Lily, had cobbled together her own hedge witch’s understanding of practical applications of magical theory, layered atop of the orthodoxy of her day.

“Perhaps,” Daphne said, “you might deign to speak with me about such things?”

Harry kept cleaning, and did his best not to react. Why was she interested in such things? It was possible, of course, that she was simply interested in magical theory, since she had been raised as a squib. But surely someone who knew chemistry at the age of ten or eleven was capable of self-study? The more obvious answer was that she was interested in establishing a friendship with the Boy-Who-Lived… but she had been raised as a squib, and probably assigned little value to the myth.

It wasn’t as if he had much to lose. It wasn’t like girls had cooties.

“I would be happy to,” Harry said.

* * *

As people started filing out of the potions classroom, Harry lingered in the classroom. There were questions he wanted to ask his head of house. Draco Malfoy was also lingering, no doubt to share the story of his humiliating social defeat.

Harry stared Draco down.

“You can go first, Potter,” Draco said. “Please, be my guest.”

“So you can eavesdrop?”

Draco snorted. “What on earth would I have to eavesdrop on? It’s blatantly obvious that Snape hates you. I’d be doing you a favor by staying here. I’d probably save you from getting your arse torn into bits.”

Harry grimaced. “That’s not a picture I ever wanted to imagine, Draco.”

The sad thing was, Draco was probably right. Snape probably wouldn’t curse Harry, if there was a witness. Harry stepped forward.

“What do you want, Potter?” Snape said. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Tell me, sir,” Harry said. “Did you ever perfect the BATSsuit spell?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Potter,” Snape said. “If that is all, I suggest you start reviewing the fourth-year potions curriculum for next class.”

“The Blunt and Arcane Trauma Shield Suit Charm,” Harry said. “A collaboration between my mother, Lily Evans Potter, and her childhood friend Severus, whose father was an abusive drunkard. All written in her lab journals.”

He wasn’t sure whether he was more upset or relieved that Snape’s face remained stony, though from the corner of his eye he noticed that Draco had an incredulous look on his face.

“Frankly, Potter, I haven’t the slightest clue how a muggle-raised orphan would have any inkling of his mother’s childhood friendships, or how he would stumble across her lab journals.”

Harry shrugged. “Oh, you know. Fate works in mysterious ways.”

“Does it now,” Snape said, his eyes glinting. “Five points from Gryffindor.”

“I’m in Slytherin, sir. Thank you for your time,” Harry said. He departed, leaving Draco behind.

* * *

Draco watched Harry leave the potions classroom. He wasn’t sure what had just happened, but he was pretty sure Harry Potter, the supposed Boy-Who-Lived (even though he didn’t have a scar) had just mouthed off to Professor Snape and gotten away with it completely.

“Sir,” he said, hesitantly.

“Am I to assume,” Snape said, “that his confidence means that he has, in effect, secured some form of social dominance over the Slytherin first-year class?”

“…Yes,” Draco said. “I’m afraid so.”

“Concerning,” Snape said. He started writing something down in a notebook he pulled out of his desk. The design was very strange to Draco. It seemed to be a notebook with an oddly synthetic spine, and green and white speckles across its cover.

Draco waited for Snape to say something else, but he seemed to be content with his writing, though he seemed to be gripping his quill rather hard.

“Sir,” Draco said, “Are you aware that my parents are… not well?”

“Yes,” Snape said. He didn’t say anything else.

Draco kept waiting.

“I was under the impression,” Snape said after a moment, “that reports of Narcissa’s departure were… overstated.”

“My father says she’s dead,” Draco said.

“In private?”

Draco didn’t answer.

“Has he ever raised his hand against you, Draco?” Snape said, looking up from his writing. His dark black eyes were glistening. Draco took a breath.

“Sometimes… sometimes I forget that mother is supposed to be dead, and I… he reminds me,” Draco said. “He starts shouting and sometimes I think he’s going to curse me… but usually she stops him.”

Snape closed his notebook, though he still held his quill, letting it dribble ink onto the table. “How do you feel about Potter’s dominant social status, Draco?”

Draco knew he was supposed to feel insulted and hurt that Potter had usurped him within Slytherin’s social order, and therefore would be the face of their year, more likely to be a prefect, and possibly Head Boy if it came to that… so he felt mostly guilty that he was relieved.

“My father was Head Boy in his day,” Draco said. “It doesn’t do him much good now.”

“You may be aware that your father and I were once… comrades,” Snape said.

Draco nodded. “He said I could trust you with my life, sir, but he’s… unwell.”

“I assume, Master Malfoy, that you are not currently in any mortal danger,” Snape said. “So what is it that you wish to ask of me?”

“I wish to be something other than… I wish to attain more… I… I… I can’t be like them,” Draco said.

“Like who?”

“Like mother and father.”

“You would turn your back on decadence? On the power and prestige of the Malfoy name?”

“I’m afraid of them,” Draco said, admitting it to himself at last. “Afraid of losing myself, like Father. Afraid of whatever Mother is. I tried being the Malfoy that Father told me to be, and Daphne Greengrass threw me into a wall. If I am to lead them, or anyone at all, I want to earn their loyalty instead of buying or bullying it the way Father does.”

“Do you truly think I can help you with that, Draco?”

“Sir, if anything, you are the only one who can,” Draco said. He wasn’t sure how to formulate this argument, but he had to get Snape on his side so he could hope to avoid becoming a junior Death Eater. “You were both one of the Dark Lord’s most trusted servants and a friend to Potter’s mudblood mother. If anyone could help me change and grow past my upbringing, it is you, sir.”

Snape snapped his quill. Draco was fairly sure he had done something wrong.

“Out,” Snape growled.

“Sir, I’m sorr—”

“Out, Malfoy!”

* * *

To Miss Astoria Greengrass,

What is going on with your sister? Who is Daphne, really? Why have I never heard of her before? Was she truly exiled as a squib?

Yours Truly,

Draco Malfoy

Draco,

I have no idea. Clearly, your mum isn’t the only one who isn’t as dead as everyone thinks.

—Tori

* * *

_What is Hypertime? Notes by Lily Evans:_

Nobody knows. At least, nobody seems to agree. Some sources say it’s the medium that ‘the timeline’ is suspended in, whatever that means. Some people say that it’s the process by which universes split into parallel universe, but then merge back together, so all the ‘heaviest’ elements of a history stay within a single reality. I don’t know how on earth you’d ever prove that something like that has happened, or how you’d even come up with that idea. Some sources say that ‘Hypertime’ is just a term for the multiverse itself, which is unsatisfying.

What most sources agree upon is that Hypertime is real. It’s some mechanism that keeps the timeline relatively self-consistent. It’s why Time Turners don’t shatter the timeline horribly — if you use a Time Turner, some Hypertime mechanism will make sure that everything ends up turning out okay.

An idle thought: if your imagination is good enough to imagine a parallel world, would Hypertime make it real? And if it was real, if you edited part of that world, or let time pass without your thoughts… imagine what sorts of things you could do with that much ‘extra time’.

A whole universe filled with people making discoveries for you… but none of those discoveries would be guaranteed to work in the ‘real world’.


End file.
